Fried turkey and southern green beans.
Sweet potatoes and yeast rolls.
Chocolate anything.
A comatose nap to digest it all.
I do not expect talk of the trappings of Christmas till I wake up on Black Friday. That's my decoration day. (Most certainly, not a time to shop.) But already, with my Halloween decorations still settling in their bin up in the attic, I'm hearing Christmas carols at Kroger, seeing Santa commercials on TV, and recycling the Target Toy Book from last Sunday's newspaper. It's still 70 degrees outside and we're already leap-frogging to Dec. 25?
Whatever happened to waiting? When I was a kid the Christmas season didn't even start till the tail end of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. This was back in the day when the three networks on our get-up-and-change-the-channel-yourself TV aired the actual people and floats marching in the parade. As expected, Santa appeared every year at the end, marking the official beginning of the Christmas season.
See, back then, it was the Thanksgiving St. Nick who heralded the call to Christmas. And we had plenty of time with only a mere month to prepare. Folks still managed to light up their house tops, chop down a tree to decorate, shop for presents, bake trays of sweets, and prepare hand-signed cards. All pretty much the things we do now, only we had 30 less days to stress about it all. That's the way it was, and we liked it.
