My Christmas Loves

I love to spend Christmas with my husband and our children. That is totally my very first love of Christmas. This year I get to spend two weeks with the kids home from school. Victor even took one of those weeks off.

The kids are so cute the way they pack and repack the gifts under the tree. They enjoy playing games, wrestling or just eating, as long as it's done together. Of course, loving Christmas with my family is a given. So the rest of my "Christmas Loves List" is maybe alittle less typical.

I love snow. I am so thrilled that this year, we'll have a WHITE Christmas. As I type this, we are snowed-in. We have more than 3 foot drifts blocking our road. Victor was able to get out through the neighbor's pasture but

that was because he was driving downhill. Coming home, going uphill, may be a different story. He will probably have to leave the vehicle in the pasture and walk home. There are 20-40 mph wind with 50 mph gusts. It's blowing the 12 inches that fell yesterday onto the road. Our neighbor has had his backhoe out now for 2 hours but he is having a tough time staying ahead of the drifting. But I'm cool with it all. I'd love to be snowed-in at home....for a month!

Decorating the house and trimming the tree is also a favorite activity of mine. It's an all-day project that must be accompanied with music, preferably Mannheim Steamroller and cider-sipping. I love antique decor, I guess because it reminds me of my youth. Old large light bulbs on the houses look like Christmas to me, not the over-done look some homes have with the Vegas-strip, neon-blinking, fake-icicle-dripping chaos.

I love Christmas Carols. I love to sing them, I love to hear them. I love them in instrumental form or performed by a famous rock band. I love them sung by a choir, especially the Mormon Tabernacle Choir or a cute school choir. I love to be in the kitchen baking with the radio playing Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, except my pet peeve is when the disc jockey cuts off the end of the song. ... "Grandma got run over by a rein...."

I love to receive Christmas cards in the mail. I get to hear from family and friends that are dear but you rarely see as the years pass. The cards are artistic, cute, inspirational and tender. I like the glittery kind. And often they arrive with a letter telling about the sender's activities during the year and includes a family picture with everyone dressed in matching blue denim and sitting out in the wilderness by a stream during an obviously non-winter month. I tape these cards to the back of our front door. We save them until next year in the Christmas storage boxes until next Christmas when my children cut them apart and make collages out of them. We have quite a collection of collages dating back to the early '90s.

I love the treats. Eggnog only arrives in the stores during Christmas. What yummy stuff. We put green food coloring in it and call it "Frognog".

This year is the first year I am going to try to make it myself. Then there's fudge, candy canes, fruit cake (I hear I am the only person on the planet that loves it) and clementine tangerines.

Christmas Parties! They are equipped with the treats I love, the music I love and friends we love. We've been to office parties with entertainment or intimate parties with friends. It's all wonderful.