Getting Into The Christmas Spirit

Ho - Ho - Ho!

The mood is kicking in. The Polish Christmas carols has gotten me pumped up. Christmas can be a very stressful time.........if YOU let it be. Of course, sometimes the stress comes through no fault of your own. I am determined to enjoy this month in spite of any or all the things that manage to irritate me. I am off to a good start. For the past two days I have been, slowly but surely, removing the factory installed Christmas lights from the Christmas tree that we have been using for five or six years. As it was, I began setting up the tree, which is in four sections, and plugged in all of the wires and BINGO!.........nothing lit up. These trees are not cheap......so I tried hard to find out what was wrong. All of the lights were in working order when we packed it away last year. I tried checking everything.....the connections......the plugs.....the electrical socket...........and I even tried replacing some of the bulbs............and all I got out of my efforts was about fifteen or sixteen lights that actually lit up. Very frustrating.

I did NOT want to have to buy a new tree.......and I knew what I would be facing.......so I decided to take the easiest and most sensible way to fix the problem............remove all of the pre-strung lights and put new strings of lights on the tree. This should work out just fine.............so I thought............I finally finished removing all of the lights from the tree tonight. The Chinese people that strung those lights must have been insane! Each wire in between each light had been viciously coiled around a branch of the tree. It was an unbelievable labyrinth of wire. I had to use wire snips to get the job done. Two bags of trash later and a set of sore hands..........my tree is ready for some new lights.

Sadly, one of those stressful things that you have no control over, reared its ugly head today. My wife took her mother to the hospital this morning. Her mom had not been feeling well and had been having some difficulties and none of this seemed to be getting any better. In a previous entry to this blog, I wrote about her mom having cancer and that I bargained with her. I would donate my sixteen inch pony tail to "Locks of Love" if she would start chemotherapy and radiation treatments. She went through with it and I donated the hair. Well, the doctors had said that the lump of cancer in her chest had "cleared up" and was essentially gone. There was hope of that anyway........but we all knew the real deal.....the inevitable would eventually come. This morning she had a CT-Scan and the news is not good. The lump is back and it is twice the size it once was. Everybody is handling this pretty well......so far........but it is going to be a rough time for us all. I will write about this in the very near future, since there are many issues that will have to be dealt with.

Meanwhile, I shall be doing my best to lighten up the mood in our home. My wife is having to go through what nobody is ever really prepared to go through.............nobody enjoys saying goodbye.......and if that isn't hard enough as it is...........nobody wants it to be a sustained event. Today, we do not know how long her mom has left with us. We suspect, though, that things are much worse than just a returning lump of cancer.

So here are a few words offered to anyone that may happen to read this:

• Cherish each and every day.
• Hug your children, be there for them, help them.
• Tell your mother and father that you love them.
• A family needs each other. Let nothing destroy it.

.......and finally...........be strong and thank God for the reason of the season.