Just a note ...

... to wish you all a very Merry Christmas.

Mother Nature gets a lump of coal in the toe of her stocking ... in my opinion anyway. Once again there was a one-two punch bringing a lot of snow and bitter cold as well.

I was able to get six miles walked at Council Point Park on Christmas Eve, but this wicked Winter weather had me shoveling this morning, and just heading back to my old standby, Memorial Park, to walk a few miles there.

The fresh blanket of snow at that locale was beautiful, and it sure was inviting to make a snow angel, but I decided I had better pass up that idea as I was already cold from shoveling and trekking through all that white stuff.

Enough already with this snow and cold!

I embarked on a mission to digitize all my photo albums as part of my year of organizing and containing clutter in my life, which was my New Year’s resolution for 2017. This project was necessitated by the fact that some of the albums had begun falling apart. They were stored in cardboard boxes in the bottom of a seldom-used cupboard, so free from dust, or sunlight and seemingly in good shape ... or so I thought. However, I watched in horror as the fabric margins which contain the three-hole punches that fit into each album’s metal posts, just tore away and the pages were lying loose in the boxes. Also, many of the plastic overlays on the pages had become yellow, or the photos had slipped around beneath the plastic film and were no longer attached to the sticky backing. I knew the integrity of all the photos was in jeopardy, thus this project. In fact, this picture sustained some damage with its mysterious-looking white blobs.

It has been fun to revisit all these albums and scrapbooks, including some vintage, sepia-toned photographs that belonged to my grandmother that are nearly a century old.

This is one of my favorite Christmas photos. It was circa 1961 and I was five years old at the time. I vividly recall my new turquoise velvet dress with the lace trim, though no color pictures of me wearing this dress exist. I remember getting the xylophone from Santa and I am sure my ping, ping, ping on the tin keys with a pair of wooden mallets drove my parents crazy, but not too crazy, because they signed me up for accordion lessons when I was seven years old. How many times can you play the scales or “Lady of Spain” before your parents are wringing their hands in despair or shoving their fingertips into their ears?

I guess if you can’t be a little drummer boy, the next best option is to be a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead ... and she played a mean xylophone.

I hope all your Christmas memories are as fond as this one is to me.

You can catch up on my blog posts before I started blogging at Patch in August 2013 by going here: http://lindaschaubblog.net/