My favorite things about Christmas

1. When I was young(er), Christmas specials were just that, shown once a year around Christmas. There were no DVDs, no TiVo, no VCRs, not even cable. So when you saw that television commercial telling you the Dr Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas was going to be on next Tuesday at 8pm, you made sure all your homework was done and you were in front of the tv at 7:55 (already having gone to the bathroom, because like I said before – no TiVo).

Not only were the animated specials only shown once a year, but commercial radio didn’t play non stop Christmas music for weeks. If you were lucky you heard Holly Jolly Christmas by Burl Ives, but you would never hear anything like Snow Miser-Heat Miser or You’re a Mean One Mr Grinch. Thank goodness tv and radio evolved, because today, if I feel like it, I can watch Rudolph, Herme and Yukon Cornelius out smart the Bumble on the Fouth of July, or listen to Boris Karloff narrate all 23 minutes of the Grinch while sitting in traffic on my way to work. Oh, how I love Christmas.

Anyway, here are my Top Ten favorite songs from classic animated Christmas specials (the shows title is in parenthesis if it’s not obvious):

•  10. Linus’s Monologue (A Charlie Brown Christmas)
• 9. We’re a Couple of Misfits (Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer)
• 8. Frosty the Snowman
• 7. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
• 6. Jingle Bells (performed by Schroeder – A Charlie Brown Christmas)
• 5. Santa Claus is Coming to Town
• 4. Put One Foot in Front of the Other (Santa Claus is Coming to Town)
• 3. Holly Jolly Christmas (Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer)
• 2. Snow Miser/Heat Miser (Year Without a Santa Claus)
• 1. You’re a Mean One, Mr Grinch

If you want to find out more about these specials, check out a few videos, or purchase a few for your self, check out my Favorite Animated Christmas Songs.

Halloween is over, Thanksgiving is only a few weeks away, and then it’s Black Friday and the countdown of the number of shopping days left until Christmas. Typically, all our Christmas decorating is done during the long weekend after Thanksgiving – but there is so much to do, it almost takes the fun out of it.

First, I have to carry all the boxes down from the attic and once again figure out where everything is. Even though all the boxes started out labeled with their contents, my wife’s desire to ‘just put everything away’ in mid January means the ornaments and decorations usually land in the first available empty box. So just getting things organized to the point where we can start decorating is a task in itself.

As much as I love my children (7 yr old twins right now), if I hear another ‘can we start decorating now’ or ‘when are you going to put up the lights outside?’, I think my head will explode. So the first order of business is to get their tree set up so they can start decorating with their favorite sports and Disney ornaments. This also allows me the time to assemble our larger ‘family’ tree (yes it’s artificial), checking to make sure all of the almost 3000 lights are working (and yes that’s ~3000 lights on a 7′ tree – it glows!). So while the kids are merrily trimming their tree, my wife and I go about sorting through the rest of the decorations, finding old favorites, and those more recently purchased. While the inside decorations are easy to set up, there are a lot of them, and then there’s the Village.

Our Christmas Village has evolved from being strictly the New England village series, to New England with a North Pole building (or two) to now being almost exclusively the North Pole series (all from Department 56). This transformation was the result of our children’s love of the various Holiday specials (Rudolph, Frosty, The Grinch, etc) which makes it easier for them to associate with a Gum Drop Factory, than a Village Hall. Also, once they realize that the Buffalo snow you’re using for the Village can double as a beard, you might as well just stop trying to decorate and enjoy the absurdity of it.

Once the inside of the house is completed, or almost, decorating the outside of the house still remains, but this requires the cooperation of the weather. As much as I enjoy Christmas, I don’t really look forward to climbing a 25ft extension ladder (sometimes in a rather chilly wind) to hand icicle lights on our house. But once completed, the lights on the house and bushes, the mini xmas trees, Candy Canes, and the large wreath hung over our front door always brings a smile to my face.

Now that all the decorations are up and the boxes are empty, it’s time to bring them back into the attic until it’s time to take it all down again. It’s a lot of work, packed into only a few days, that gets to be enjoyed for basically the month of December, and maybe a week or two in January.

So this year, to take some of the stress out of decorating, an dmake the Season a little longer, my wife asked me to start bringing down some of the Christmas items while I was in the attic putting away the Halloween decorations.

This naturally got me to thinking - is it ever too early to start putting up the Christmas decorations?

 Or, are you an ‘extremist’ who simply leaves their house decorated all year long? and if you do WHY?

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In order to keep up the Halloween atmosphere, what started as a few spooky faces taped onto the doors, has evolved into light up pumpkins, black wire trees, window decals and whatever my wife saw last year that we need to add to this year’s decorations. The one thing that doesn’t change is the fact that we need to have centerpiece for the table (the pizza or Chinese food just wouldn’t taste the same without it). Ours, as you can see below, is fairly simple.

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One of my favorite childhood memories was helping my mother make dozens and dozens of Christmas cookies. This was done over the course of many nights when one of the annual Christmas specials was on Back in the days before, TiVo, DVDs, and yes even VCRs, if you wanted to see Merry Christmas Charlie Brown or How the Grinch Stole Christmas, you had to wait all year until it was shown – once, and you didn’t dare go to the bathroom until a commercial was on because there was no ‘pause’. I loved it when baking night fell on the same night as one of those cherished specials.

My mother, being Italian, always cooked (and in this case baked) to serve a crowd, usually a very hungry crowd. So it was not uncommon for her to increase the size of the recipe by 8X, yes that’s right 8X. If the recipe produced 2dozen cookies, we made 16 dozen. Add to that the fact that sehe usually baked 4 or 5 different types of cookies, and you’d think we were starting our own business. Even though we had the family over for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (nothing was better than Mom’s Lasagna), we were still left with enough cookies to enjoy well into March.

Every cookie was made as perfectly as possible, from the shape of the Almond Crescents to the branches on the Butter Cookie Christmas Trees. Once baked and cooled, all the cookies were stored in round, aluminum foil lined, tins and stacked in the den. We worked and worked while the much loved Christmas specials played in the background. Don’t get me wrong, it was a lot of work over several evenings, and Mom wasn’t always in the best of moods, but it was something to look forward to.

So every year, when those chilly New York December days rolled around again, my mother would buy pounds and pounds of butter, then break out the hand-cranked cookie cutter and we’d get start rolling, shaping, and decorating our way into another Christmas season. And now, since my own children are old enough to start helping, I get to do it all over – with them!

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