Nothing. Absolutely nothing but the sound of silence. It is a wonderful sound after the hustle and bustle of the holidays. Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas! I enjoy shopping with money I have saved just for this occasion. I love being able to buy whatever I want for those I love and not have to worry about how to pay for it. I love making the Christmas cake and eating most of it myself. I love wrapping the gifts in elegant paper with fanciful bows. I love the lights on the tree and family and friends. But, I love when it’s all over, everything is put away and life returns to “normal”.
We enjoyed Christmas day at Bill’s house with Scott and Trevor, Kris, Wendy and Dan . We had a great ham dinner with garlic mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, fruit salad, rolls, green bean casserole and chocolate cream pie for dessert. Trevor was so cute and well behaved and had a great time playing with all the new toys from Santa. He spent the night with Papa Bill and me and Bill took him home later the next day. We played Cootie and race cars, painted and watched some cartoons.
Greg, Vanessa and Ella came for dinner on Sunday, along with Wendy & Dan. We had lasagna prepared by Bill, along with garlic bread, salad and a wonderful pumpkin cake that Bill made at the request of Vanessa. He made it for Thanksgiving and she asked for it special again at Christmas. We opened gifts, again, and oohed and ahhed over Ella as she is getting so big. She is sitting by herself and motoring around on her tummy on the floor. It won’t be long before she figures out the crawling thing and is all over the house.
Then today…it was silence once Greg and his family packed up and returned home to MA. Bill and I put the bags of boxes, wrapping paper and other assorted trash in his car and took it to his house for the trash pickup as the dumpster in my area was overflowing. Then we spent some nice quality time sitting in the sun in the glass room, feeding our spirits and souls with sunshine. The temps over the last couple of days have been unusually warm, in the 40’s and 50’s. It has melted much of the snow that we received the week before. We may both make it through this winter after all.
In my previous post I talked about my “retirement chain”. It counts down the number of units (essentially weeks) that remain before my retirement; the number now is only 33! I actually got a little teary eyed when I was driving home the other morning when I realized that I will only repeat that action 33 more times before I don’t have to return to my job at the fire department. I will probably be crying my eyes out on the last trip home, even though I know it is “time” for me to leave the job.
It was a good holiday and I’m already looking forward to next year.
