ho ho ho

Way cool!
I like this time of year. I especially like the weather here in Missouri. Yes, I know you are having warm weather up north where I used to live.....but the witch-hazel is blooming. Wow, that will stop you in mid-step. What a heavenly smell in the middle of winter. Opps....sorry winter hasn't started yet. But my time-clock is still set to northern time. Winter starts the first of December and lasts until the first of April. Ish....I used to hate winters.
We are still having frost in the valley. That is slowing down the grass, up on the top of the hills it is really green. Witch-hazel is a bush and has these little waxey looking blooms. Little thin leaf things open up in the sun....like the middle of a flower....about the size of a berry. I grabbed a branch on the way back from the little-ram pen and inhaled. Witch-hazel grows along the creeks. I really wanted to cut it off and take it inside....but it is a living thing....and I have a problem with that.
Isn't that a funny thing?....My yards and gardens can quickly be over grown with living things that don't belong. I have a great deal of trouble pruning, or cutting trees down....or catching fish.
Which is why I mentioned fishing without a worm. I like the anticipation of fishing....but not the catching.
As any older person, I seem to be thinking a lot about my youth....especially all the sights and sounds and smells of Christmas. Glass ornaments were real glass, if you dropped them, trimming the tree, they broke in a thousand pieces of glass and could cut. Tinsel was real metal. Ornaments could be wound with real wires and little pieces that could be eaten. The cardboard chimneys had real spun "angel glass". If I was lucky, someone might use real candy canes. My best-friend was my cousin Dicky. We spent all our waking time together until his family moved to town. Dicky and I spent a lot of the Christmas season prowling under grandma's tree...poking at ornaments. Folding and unfolding the shiney cardboard ones. Snitching candy canes to eat. One of our best games was unscrewing one of the bulbs....which were real big and hot....one loose bulb turned off all the tree lights. Then we had to go around and round testing each bulb to find the one that wasn't tight. Must have driven the grown-ups to distraction.
I still have one of Grandma's old german santas....it seems to be the only thing that goes on my tree, besides lights and candy canes. If we don't have a tree, I cut a branch (only one that is on the ground already) he he....and hang santa on a branch.
When we were walking the dogs down the road yesterday, I found a big white pine branch that had broken off in the storm. Today, I am going back and cut off all the greens for the porch.
Free greens...gott'a love it.
Go hug everybody...it's gonna be Christmas!