Weekend of Racquetball Courts and (Artificial) Trees

You know, when you remember your childhood, if your family celebrated Christmas, you probably have one glittery, magic-tinged memory of visiting Santa's Workshop or a Winter Wonderland display of some sort. Maybe your community center, or your community theater, or perhaps your preschool even, elaborately decorated a room or a portable (trailer) filled with gauzy fake snow and empty boxes wrapped with gold and red paper and lots of bows. A miniature train choo-chooed along a track, dolls and stuffed animals were set up among the dainty fake trees and mountains of the cozy wintry scene. (I could have gotten some of this mixed up in my memory of It's a Small World at Disney World. I could.) Maybe you were only 4 and lived in Florida where it might have been 75 degrees outside and you didn't even remember snow, but Man, that was the best thing ever.

So, our Y, which does wonderful things, had a Breakfast with Santa on Saturday. They talked it up and handed out flyers at the girls' gymnastic classes, so the girls were excited. While I wasn't expecting the rosy, possibly imaginary visions from my childhood, I was at least expecting breakfast. C. says the correct interpretation for these sorts of public "breakfasts" is "pancakes." Unfortunately it was just donut holes and cartons of milk. (Like public school breakfast at Title I schools! I kid you not--I worked in two! Except some days we had deep-fried french toast sticks.) The kids dug in. I stood there, wiping powdered sugar off their clothes. Okay, maybe I ate one donut. One chocolate and one powdered sugar.

The picture with Santa is very very poor, but the Y took one (free) of every family and I just have to pick it up at the desk. I hope it's better, although I don't know what I'm going to do with it, exactly. I had to snap fast because the time with Santa was very precious.

What was more fun than all that was the racquetball courts. The old racquetball courts, which don't get used much now that the new building has nicer ones. I remember these courts from my childhood, with their tiny doors (5 feet tall, I judge, from the number of times I failed to duck enough going in and out) and open, netted roofs. The girls played This is our house, please knock and I will show you around. I only got one picture before the battery died. Of course. But it was fun.

Maybe I'll find my mystical winter wonderland again someday . . .




Emily really really wanted to get the Christmas decorating done, like, last week, and Penny was excited because Emily was excited. So after we'd come home from the "breakfast" and had some real food (Apples! Eggs!), I said, "Let's do it." Cue roaring crowd and jumping pixies, one of whom is wearing both her "princess dress" and her "princess skirt." So Daddy got down all the boxes from the top shelf of the closet, where only he can reach them.





After these blissful, if messy, scenes of children and ornaments, Daddy went on the weekly grocery run. Penny wanted to go, too, so Emily and I stayed to finish the tree trimming. Mostly this consisted of me hanging ornaments and her 1) rearranging the manger scene 2) opening bags and boxes and saying, Ooh, Mommy, look! or 3) playing a game with two little girl ornaments and one bigger Girl Scout ornament who served as the mother for her purposes, mostly telling the little girls, Yes, they could do that, but, Be careful.

I was adjusting something on the bottom branches, kneeling on the ground, while simultaneously talking to my sister on the phone. So my head was basically tipped to my shoulder, holding the phone, when I heard a crack and the tree began to tip.

"Yikes!" I said, or perhaps some less polite word, and told my sister I'd have to call her back. Emily tried to help me hold up the tree, while I tried to snap one of the cheap-o plastic base pieces back into the base. Of course, the cheap-o plastic piece was cracked, and then another one cracked and the whole tree came crashing down, to more impolite words about the world ending and no-way-am-I doing-this-all-over-again. Emily ran to her room, crying, convinced by my irrational ravings that there would be no tree this year. And probably no Christmas.

I had to lure her out with a snack of buttered bagels. Yum.

If I had been thinking like a blogger, I would have taken a picture of the destruction; instead I just de-strung the lights, un-hung the ornaments, discarded half of the cheap-o garlands I'd been keeping year after year for no discernible reason, and pulled the dadblasted tree into sections small enough to fit into plastic garbage bags.

When Daddy got home from the grocery store, I sent him back out to Lowe's, where we scored a not-quite-as-cheap tree (half off!). Then I went out for an exercise walk with my iPod and let him redo the trimming.

And finally, who likes the tree? Kitty likes the tree!



He's been sleeping under it every night since, like, 2 days ago when all this happened.