Christmas Comes But Once A Year

"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.
I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future."

-Scrooge

Here we are on Christmas Eve (are you tracking Santa?). I am spending it with my family and NJM. My mother would be proud, because she hated when people were alone on holidays. We're having a nice dinner and I have kept my father's tradition of making homemade potato chips with dinner. Later NJM and I may go to Midnight Mass, which will take place at 10:00. Then it will back home to meet up with Santa and finish wrapping presents. There are still cards to be mailed to. Honest, yours is in the mail, really.

Tomorrow morning we will have a family celebration and then we are off to my MIL's house for Christmas dinner. Then it's off to NY to spend the weekend with my father (and his new girlfriend) and my brother, who will be down from Maine. We are planning an excursion into NYC to blow LBA's mind with a trip to FAO Schwartz and the Rockefeller Center tree. We will try to take in some of the windows on Fifth Avenue as well.

I leave you with a story about a popular Christmas tradition and my heartfelt wishes to all of you, my faithful readers, for a blessed holiday season and health and happiness in the New Year. I have posted here before, one of my favorite stories about Christmas, and as Clarence remarks in "It's a Wonderful Life," "Remember, no man is a failure who has friends."

The OSG family and the Brave Astronaut did not get out to cut down our own trees this year. We settled on some nice conifers from the local Lowes:

• On Christmas Trees - Although the Christmas tradition of adornment with floral decorations has been traced back to the Roman festivities of Kalends, the Christmas tree has more modern German origins. Records indicate that Christmas trees were sold in Alsace in 1531; in 1605 a German citizen wrote: "At Christmas, they set up fir trees in the parlours . . . and hang thereon roses cut out of many-coloured paper." Folklore has long associated Martin Luther as an early champion of the Christmas tree – crediting him (probably erroneously) with inventing the practice of lighting trees with candles. The British love of Christmas trees is usually linked to Prince Albert who, in the 1840s, did much to make the tree part of the British Christmas. Records indicate, however, that Queen Charlotte had a Christmas tree in Windsor as early as 1800. The most famous Christmas tree in Britain is that which stands in London’s Trafalgar Square. Presented by the people of Norway each year since 1947, the tree is a symbolic gift of thanks for the role Britain played during the Second World War, and the sanctuary King Haakon VII was given in 1940.