Friday Bag o’ Seasons Greetings

I’m gonna say these bags of holiday cheer represent Hanukkah, Christmas, Festivus, Kwanzaa, Yule, and Eid al-Adha. Don’t count ’em and try to guess which three religions I really mean … just go with me on this, okay?

Like most white middle class Americans, we have Jewish and Christian friends. We know pagans and atheists, gays and straights. Most in our circle are white, but we count several people of other ethnicities among our friends and relatives. Thanks to our travels, we know people in different parts of the world.

All of which is to say it’s time for our annual season’s greetings letter and I’m running late … you saw that coming, didn’t you? Oh, the letter’s written, it’s the tough part that’s still to do: the printing, the envelope stuffing, the address labels, licking stamps, and so on. This job always falls to me, which is fair since Donna does literally everything else. This morning I sent out 50 or 60 email versions of the letter; 25 more have to go by snail mail to the Luddites on our list.

The more than welcome storms that recently visited our beloved California drifted east and gave us much-needed rain too, but today is sunny and dry and this afternoon I’ll saddle up the motorcycle and run down to Office Max for envelopes & printer cartridges. I might even drop by Kinkos to make copies of our Thanksgiving family photo, which is part of the letter. That’ll be better than buying up all the color ink cartridges in Tucson in order to print them at home, no?

Of course there are a million other things we have to do to get ready for Christmas, especially since we’re spending this one at home, and we haven’t gotten around to any of them yet. Except for a single strand of colored lights around our front door, you’d think the Grinch lived here. The plastic bins of Christmas decorations are still on the shelves in the garage. The house is a wreck. We haven’t bought the ingredients for the food we plan to cook. And so on. I’d be depressed if I didn’t know it’s this way every year, and that we’ll pull it all together at the last minute.

Since 1979, whenever we’ve been home for the holidays, we’ve invited single friends to share Christmas Eve with us. We have a shrimp boil and feed them clam chowder with cheesy biscuits, and we all trim the tree … which stays unadorned and unlit until that night … together. Back in our USAF days, our single friends were fellow pilots and support officers from squadrons we were assigned to. Today they’re close friends from Tucson, many of them members of the running club we’ve belonged to for years. We’ve invited six to share Christmas Eve with us this year, and we’ll be joined by our daughter Polly as well.

When your kids move away and you find yourself in your 60s, living in an empty nest, the old holiday spirit doesn’t show up until the last minute. These days it doesn’t drop by until Christmas Eve, and I must say with all the news lately I’m looking forward to its arrival.

The family photo I mentioned earlier is already up on the blog, so I won’t add it to this post, but will put up a couple of recent thumbnails you may enjoy:

That’s Schatzi the iDog, helping me with some air museum files & photos yesterday. She loves to curl up on that pillow under the warm desk lamp; snoring and all I couldn’t have a better desk buddy. As you can tell from the second photo, I’m growing another beard. Right now I’m at the homeless-alcoholic-panhandler stage, or at least that’s the way I feel I must look to other people. I led tours at the air museum Wednesday and no one seemed put off, so perhaps to them I look more like I’m at the male-model-who-does-hotel-booking-website-ads-on-TV stage. Barring a sudden change in hormone production, the chin whiskers should fill in soon.

Happy holidays, everyone!