But, there is a short list of songs that I do enjoy hearing once a year.

Below is some of the songs that I like to hear to get into the Christmas mood:

1. Santa Claus is Coming to Town by Bruce Springsteen
2. Happy Christmas (War is Over) by John Lennon
3. Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer by Elmo and Patsy
4. I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus by Jimmy Boyd
5. The 12 Pains of Christmas by Bob Rivers
6. The 12 Days of Christmas by the McKenzie Brothers
7. The Christmas Song by the Chipmunks
8. Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy by Bing Crosby and David Bowie
9. Wonderful Christmastime by Paul McCartney

I know that I’m probably missing a few more and I will add them when I think of them.

Do you have certain Christmas songs that you like to/have to hear every year to get you into that holiday spirit?  Let me know.

One the other hand – she can’t spell!

One of my strengths is spelling, and it’s my pet peeves too.  It drives me wild when I see simple words totally misspelled, especially knowing  spell checkers are embedded into nearly every piece of technology out there.

So, getting emails from my mother is like trying to decrypt hieroglyphics from the city of Atlantis.  Getting a 5 sentence email from her can sometimes take me several minutes to read (and re-read) before I can understand it!

So anyway………

Sometime back in the 70′s my mother made a Christmas tree skirt to cover the green metal base of our non-authentic looking artificial tree that we used for more than two decades.  Because of this skirt, I think that every Christmas tree should have one to make the bottom more presentable, and the skirt shouldn’t be one of those flimsy Dollar Store versions either.

The skirt my mother made was very elaborate.  Fluffy white background with pieces of holly all on it, and in the center in big red letters the words “Merry Chrismas”

No, that’s not a typo by me, but one by my mother.

Every year after Thanksgiving we would put up our tree and I would sit there and look at our misspelled skirt and cringe.

As other families where celebrating Christ, we were putting ‘Chris’ back into Christmas.  I don’t know who this Chris was that we were celebrating.  At one point I thought that maybe it was Chris Dodd who is a politician from Connecticut (where I grew up) or Christopher Lloyd when he was on “Taxi”.

Either way, that skirt came out every year until 1992 when I joined the Air Force and the Christmas tree got smaller and smaller until it became a 1 foot tall tree on the countertop.  I haven’t seen that skirt in years, but I know that my mom has it packed up in a box somewhere in her shed.  I know that one day when she passes I’m going to go through her things and find that skirt tucked away somewhere and I’m going to take it and put it under my Christmas tree.  Even though I will still cringe from the spelling I will know that it will still be on display every holiday in my house because it’s something my mother made and still has sentimental meaning to me.

I never really understand why so many people return things, especially on the DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS!!!!  Is there no thought put into the gifts that you give people?  Granted, there are people that you don’t see more than a few times a year that you buy a gift for, but has anyone every heard of the telephone or e-mail?  Why not just contact the person and ask them point blank what they want!  We do this with kids.  We ask the little ones to “give us a list of what you want.”

That makes things much easier.

Now, I understand that sometimes people can get the same gift from more than one person and returning one would make sense, but why can’t we just tell each other WHAT WE WANT FOR CHRISTMAS?

(Footnote: I thought that it would be funny is these major department stores put on their receipts “No refunds or exchanges on any merchandise purchased between Thanksgiving and Christmas.”  That would really tick off people.)