Holiday Music

Like most people, this is my absolute FAVORITE time of year. The weather has FINALLY cooled down and the highs are in the upper 50's, where they should be for this time of year. The leaves are still falling (but not for much longer) and the grasses have finally turned almost completely brown. Yea! Fall is finally here in all it's glory.

As a rule for myself, I try not to "rush the seasons". In the fall, I like to bake pies, make "pumpkin-y" things, put orange and yellow and brown decorations out, and watch Thanksgiving movies. But mid-November gets a little overlappy for me. I know Thanksgiving is only a week away, but the day after Thanksgiving is when we typically start decorating for Christmas, so there's virtually no time to downshift between Thanksgiving warm and fuzzies and Christmas Wonderland.

This year, we're going to be out of town for Thanksgiving and won't be home until November 30th, so we'll miss our traditional "decorate on Friday" fanfare. I can't help but get in the Christmas spirit just knowing that we're going to decorate THIS weekend instead of next. I can hardly wait to get everything down from the attic tomorrow! It's like discovering my dishes, blankets, trinkets, and ornaments all over again.

To get myself in the Christmas spirit, I LOVE to turn my TV to the radio station channels. Direct TV has the Holidays and Happenings channel. The TV screen goes blank after a few minutes, so no one would ever know the music was coming from the TV. Most of the songs on this channel are old Christmas standards sung by Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, etc.

I LOVE to have a perfectly clean house, a fire in the fireplace, all the blinds open, and Ray Charles singing "Winter Wonderland" in the background. When they kids come home from school, they throw their backpacks in the couch and lay on the floor in front of the fire place and play with the cars and trucks and sing along to 50 year-old songs without a care in the world. What could be better than that???