Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson for December 17, 2016

eat your heart out, Tim Burton, for that’s really the nightmare before Christmas

This kinda makes me glad I don’t have siblings… yet I have worse nightmares than that.

Oh, pooh, it’s just a dream.

Alice is having a challenging holiday season.

When my grand-nieces visit at Xmas-time, I always haul out the album and show them pictures of me and my sister “surrounded” by our few toys. For the pictures, the packages of new socks and underwear used to pad out the pile beneath the tree were removed. We were poor, but didn’t know it.

I remember one time, when I was bout eight or so, an older cousin was showing my sister and me her Christmas gifts, which included a new comb and hairbrush. She was very pleased, which we couldn’t understand. Later on, we decided that growing up wasn’t such a hot idea after all – no toys made for a dull holiday.

I’m sure the real tree will be huge – and Alice will find fault with it.

One of the best Christmases my family had growing up was with a short, skinny, bad-looking tree. We had just arrived at our new air base so we didn’t have our usual artificial tree yet (our stuff was being shipped over) so my mom went out and bought a sad looking tree. Wound up being the BEST Christmas that year.

This is the size of our tree this year: four feet tall. It was a mistake and is never happening again. Ever.

I remember one Christmas, I got a mechanical hockey game set, which could be played either with a miniature puck or with a standard-sized marble. I didn’t actually get to play any games on it until the next day however, because my dad and a friend of his, whose family was with us for Christmas, monopolized it for the entire evening… ☺

We picked up a sickly hemlock one year when the forestry guys were thinning the woods — you wouldn’t believe how much that thing could shed!

Tiny car, tiny tree, tiny bad dream, tiny princess.

I think I see a pattern here. Must have something to do with the season….

The older cats all stopped climbing the tree, but the foundling kitten is up there right now peering out from his high perch amongst the branches. And there goes a daughter to rescue the tree from his shenanigans. Happy Holidays to all.

“Share a pair of socks….”

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Hmmm… don’t know if that means wearing a pair of socks on alternate days, or each of them wears one sock at a time. Interesting concept either way.