Early To Rise

I am up so incredibly early this morning because there is no sleep left in me. Just this droning tiredness. There is excitment around here because we have all been so busy trying to get through life. Tim has had extra nasty work to do this week and kids have been checking in. Everyone seems to be worried about something.

Dane comes home today and Bren flys to Kelowna to meet Megs. Stephen has taken on extra paramedic duties and Chris and Vashti are having a week long party at their house on the Island.

We decided to shut down hyper last night and just watch any old crapola on the TV. Ate plain and had turkish delight and tea and just snuggled up. The house will have to whip itself into shape. There is a tidy room waiting for Dane and the stuff is more or less picked up. No tree and no lights and nothing indicating the insanity of Christmas.

I won't do frenzy this year and have given everyone around me permission not to either.

When I was a child my Grandparents didn't give gifts. They gave a day filled with food and family. They had a little farmhouse that creaked everywhere and that was dusty and untidy.
There were old Farm Weekly magazines and books everywhere and three bedrooms.

We stacked up in the house. Each family took a bedroom. There were six in my family and six people slept in the bedroom. Christmas dinner consisted of a few children's table made from old cardboard boxes and covered with a cloth and room to eat on the stairs. We fought to eat on the stairs. You sat on a stair and used the one above you as the table. If the kid above you spilled anything it landed on your head. We had to avoid the woodstove because it burned your skin in a second. The part of the country we lived in didn't have electricity or flush toilets until the late sixties.

In the beginning we didn't really get more than one or two small gifts. I remeber my favourite Christmas. I was six. I got a doll in a cradle and one story book. The story book was a collection of stories by Hans Christien Anderson and there were black and white illustrations. I coloured them all and still have the book. My favourite was a grueling story called the "Little Mermaid".
Not the cleaned up Disney version but the real story with her feet feeling like she was stepping on sharp knives with every step she took after losing her fins and tail. She died of love at the end and disappeared in an ocean foam. So "tragicle" that I cried for a week. I learned to read on that book and on Eaton's catalogs, "Little Women" and the weekend comics from the "Star Weekly" and the Farm magazines.

One Christmas my mother or grandmother let me have the whole catalogue. I cut out every lady and collaged her and made paper dolls and sewed clothes for months.We also got boxes. Wood and cardboard. Shoe boxes were the most prized because they turned into diaramas and houses and schools.

Give children the gift of imagination. Not lots of toys. Ever noticed that they seem to be more fascinated by the boxes anyways.