8:54 AM, Tuesday, 21 December 2021

I’ve been working a few days on a Christmas song / carols playlist on Spotify and shared it with Quilla. It has songs and artists more traditional that I remember my parents playing when I was growing up like Andy Williams and Tony Bennett and Perry Como, but it has new things… new songs written for the occasion, new artists or old songs done in a new way. I’m still working on it and I’m up to 230 songs.
Yesterday we had a dusting of snow in Kent, Washington. I guess the mountains around here are getting hammered, but we don’t get too much down here near sea level, but it’s been cool …last night down to 34. And I remember how much it mattered to me for there to be snow for Christmas and how getting rained on in San Francisco in the years when I would not be able to go home to Pennsylvania. Aside from not being able to be with family the absence of snow and other traditions… drunks in the street not being one of them, for example…just didn’t make it seem like the holiday should. Snow was a missing element and it could be that way here, although I do have the decorations up and the proper music.
My family was not materialistic and did not have much money when I was younger but they would always go all out for Christmas I guess going into debt or using savings I don’t know and my sister and I would look through the catalog from Sears for a month or so picking out what we would like and writing our letters to Santa Claus in the hopes we would get a portion of those things and my parents were always good about making Christmas big both in the church with all that signified of course and to make their kids happy coming downstairs very early on Christmas Day. We go from thing to thing opening up and playing with things a little bit and then I always remember later in the day thinking how sad I was that the throw was over. A rocket going up and then following the Earth.
I remember getting up early and going and waking up the parents my parents who had been up all late working on things remember my dad would have preached late into the night at Christmas Eve services and it was a busy season so they would all be tired but he was also having to put together things and set things up and he would go down and put on the train and the Christmas lights and some in an album of Christmas music and he would call back up we would wait upstairs and he would call out and say well he’s not seeing anything it looks like maybe he didn’t come I’ll wait here’s something and when he was good and ready he’d call us and we’d go flying down the stairs and start opening things up gloriously fun times and years later I was the one who would always make the biggest deal in our family about getting people lots and lots of gifts because I remember how much that mattered to us in those early years.