Oh, Christmas Tree

This started out as an email to Little Willow, but I'm 99.999999999% sure she won't mind if I share it with the rest of the world too, so here ya go.

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Two years ago, right after Christmas my mom decided to get rid of excess "stuff" and chose to give away some garlands (green things made of similar materials to the fake Christmas trees).  She dragged several bags of the green stuff over to the donation bin on the corner behind her house.
Last year she went to get out the Christmas tree and found... garlands.

OOps!

She went out and bought herself a new tree, decorated it and all was well with the world.

Two months ago mom was getting ready to have the sundeck fixed so she was moving things out of the garage and storing them in the house.  One of her storage spaces is under the captains beds in the kids room.  When she lifted Julia's mattress to store something under there she found... the old Christmas tree!

To make a long story short, she decided I could have the new tree since she had found the old one, and Thursday I moved things around to make room for it. I put it up and decorated it yesterday and it is now making my room look gloriously holidayish.   I picked up some sparkly blue garlands and plastic icicles at the dollar store to supplement my meagre ornament supply and splurged on some pretty LED light strands at Canadian Tire.  Now I just need a star or angel or fairy for the top.

In the last 24 hours I have been given the following tree-top suggestions via Facebook:  a Stuffed Moose (Patrice), a Frog (Mrs. Doc Froggy), the Vampire Frog hat my mom wears on Halloween each year (Mom, emphatically seconded by Patrice).  While the Vampire Frog head would fulfill my family obsession with frogs, and nod to the Jossverse in its vampireness, I don't think it would quite go with the Christmasy feel I'm going for, nor would it go with the fairy and dragon motif throughout my living room.

An interesting sidenote: The tree is next to my fishtank, and it seems the fish are somewhat mesmerized by the lights... the guppies keep swimming over the the side of the tank closest to the tree and looking towards the tree.  I was afraid they might get freaked out by the lights, but they seem quite entranced instead.

My Hero

I wrote the following in 1994 when I was 15.   As tomorrow is Remembrance Day, I thought it might be fitting to share here today.

My Hero

My grandfather fought in the war before my father was born, but he was lucky, he came home. When I was two months old, my grandfather was at our house on 12th, laying out cement in our garage, when he had a heart attack.

I never really got to know him, to hear his stories, or to feel his love, which I'm told he had a lot of. I never had a chance to tell him I loved him. Even though I can't remember him, I'm sure I did love him. And I never got to thank him for what he did for me fifty years ago.

He went to war, not because he wanted to, or agreed with it, but because he felt that he had to. Even though he doesn’t lie in Flanders Fields, nor did he die saving the world, he risked his life for me, and therefore Remembrance Day means a lot to me.

I look at his picture and I think, 'what kind of man was he?' I’ll never know for sure but I imagine him as being a hero, in a way, even though he never did anything particularly heroic. He merely did what he believed had to be done.

I just wish that he was here today so that I could call him up and thank him for giving me a better life.

~ JS 

November 10^th 1994