My front door…it’s open, please come on in!
Ignore the Nobody gets in to see the Wizard sign; sarcasm can be found even in my decorating schemes. Inside, I’m doing my usual, yearly complaining. I hate putting away Christmas decorations, hate it, hate it, HATE IT!
I pause to take a deep breath and think calming thoughts of warm summer days, beaches, country fairs, butterflies and flowers in the garden…Deer!… trampling and eating all of said flowers…sigh…better think about something else.
Allrighty…I am my own worst enemy regarding Christmas. I push the limits with decorating, shopping and cooking; doesn’t make me public enemy # 528 but…that’s how I feel at this very moment. Why? I’ll tell you why…I collect….Snowmen. Yup….at last rough count, the white, bulbous cheery little bundles of snow joy approach the magic number of almost 900, give or take a few dozen.
How did it all start?
Well, many years ago, while doing some holiday shopping, I noticed a sad ceramic snowman, broken and shoved to the back of a display. It was a one-of-a-kind with a broken, snowy arm and minus its carrot-nose; a tragic shell of the snow person it once was. Oh, how it called my name as I approached the shelf it rested on! You and I both know that no other living creature would have purchased it…except for moi, and so I did. Took it home, dug out my craft supplies and in due time, a happy new, rehabilitated snowman emerged from its former destruction with a fresh new nose that rivaled that of any nose Joan Rivers has had in recent years along with a mended right arm that most surgeons would admire with envy.
From that moment on, it became a mission, one of Snowman Rescue, at least for a while. Once the collect-every-cute-snowman-in-sight bug bit me, it was all downhill from there. The decision was made to go all out with an all-Snowman decorating theme.
Special ornaments and decorations collected over the years were given to my daughters in order to make room for what was to come, and still does, as my obsession has grown to epidemic proportions.
The down-side of this is the time involved in getting everything unpacked each year and placed; village pieces that create individual snow scene vignettes are tucked into the shelves of the living room wall unit. One of our cats always managed to leap to the top of that unit, hiding behind the snowmen but would always get snagged when he poked his carrot-less nose out of the display. Every room wears its share of snow men, women and children, including the bathrooms where smiling little faces grin at you while you’re uh…..you know.
It takes me usually about one week to cart everything down from our attic and unpack, then at least two to three weeks to complete decorating, including our tree; that is a story in itself. Color-coded branches that take almost three hours to insert in their place and then fluff-out in order to produce a realistic look. Purchased this green giant from one of the now bankrupt and closed Treasure Island stores; it’s a modest twelve feet tall; cathedral ceiling height at its highest point is eleven feet <insert husbandly scowl>; no biggie, just shortened the top branch where the star rests <insert wifely smug facial expression>. This tree is soooo wide that it stretches almost half-way across our living room and peeks into one entrance to our dining room area.
Tree hitting ceiling>
I also got a little creative with the big empty space in our wall unit where a television is supposed to be. Nope..NO TV in our living room, that’s a place where I want people to sit and talk and be focused on each other, not a bunch of overpaid, testosterone-driven baseball or football players, the O’Reilly Factor or anything else. That room is a gathering place for stories, laughter and memories and with a woodstove elsewhere in the house, I missed having an upstairs fireplace sooooo….I made what my husband tells everyone is…Patty’s fake fireplace.
