Christmas Lights and Hope For A New Year

Christmas and Hanukkah mean so many things to me, as I'm sure they do for you. It is the season of family, new beginnings, and a festival of lights signaling the brightness of hope. This year, the lights in Windsor Town Green were made even more special by the outpouring of thanks for our First Responders.

Many of the grammar school classes chose to honor these heroes, who helped protect many of us and our homes from the devastating fires in Sonoma County. Our heart goes out for the loss of life and property we experienced as a community, and for what's going on in Southern California now.

We know what they're feeling, because we lived through the same. There are families spending the holidays in an apartment, or rented home, instead of the family home they celebrated in for years. For some, it will be truly a new beginning. For others, it chronicles the end of an era, and how some things will never be the same again. Displaced and evacuated peoples are finding all sorts of new ways to celebrate this end of 2017 as we mourn the past and adjust to the future. It's what we do.

I make a pilgrimage to look at favorite house lights and the trees in the Town Green every year, but this year affected me more. My grandkids enjoyed looking at each and every one of the trees -- I think there were over 100 -- all decorated by classrooms, families, businesses and civic groups from all areas of our county. I would say that the overarching theme was that of gratitude, how we are family, all of us, and how we'll all survive.

We ran into a group of carolers strolling down the streets, a gathering of Santas and elves celebrating at a local pub, and a vendor on the square selling bright flashing wands and glow-in-the-dark necklaces. We finished off our meal with ice cream at Powell's, and of course couldn't resist bringing home some peppermint bark, Giants Pez and salt water taffy.

I like it when the windows in local restaurants fog up, when the laughter behind glass as office parties and family get-togethers take place. I found myself missing the family members who will not be with us this year, and it gave me an improved opening scene for a novella I'm trying to finish.

We've had a mild, crisp winter so far, with a cold snap. I harvested a dozen pomegranate fruits, about two dozen new mandarins and some Meyer lemons. I came home to a cracklling fire and turned in early, wearing socks and a flannel nightgown. I considered penning a note to Santa myself.

And I dreamt of what glorious things were in store for me next year -- for all of us. Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah. May the joys of the season be many for you and your family.

(PS - Blogger is not letting me respond to your lovely responses, but know I've been reading them all one by one. Thank you all!)  -- Sharon

Love is All You Need

Honoring Home Town Heroes serving the military

Just Enough For Christmas

Got into the Christmas spirit this year in a big way, and still I'm running around catching up. Still finishing the final draft of a book I started some years ago, a paranormal, and it's taken me some time to get my head wrapped around the hero again. But boy, once he got me. He got me.

We opted for a huge tree this year: 13 feet. It has a nearly 10" base, so it had to be carved up at the bottom to fit in the largest tree holder they make (the one without cables and having to screw into the base of the tree). Took a home visit and custom cut at the base after we got the thing home, and 2 strong men to get it into my living room. But boy, what a treat!

Over the 45+ years I've made a home here, I've collected ornaments and I finally got a tree that could hold nearly all of them. I said nearly. Yes, you are not reading this wrong. I will still have an overflow. After years of saving broken ornaments (arms and legs of elves and cowboys and supernatural beings, fruits and noses and flowers off favorite ornaments), I finally threw out the "bone yard" and it nearly broke my heart.

But I have too much in my basket of Christmas, and I'm a bit on an emotional overload. The grandkids came over last night and we decorated the little trees I have always done to absorb the cute small ornaments my mom had. Her sad little tree didn't survive the multiple moves my father did after her passing.

Christmas is a hopeful time. We're reviewing what happened this year and celebrating the wins, remembering the happy events and mourning some of the losses. I will never forget what it feels like to be a child on Christmas morning, which is something I share with many of you.

I am grateful for the blessings of family, readers, the business I've built and the stories I've told. I hope to get better and better with my writing. I'm always seeking to be relevant. Reviews are up and down and with them come my emotions. But that's life. It comes with the territory. I found my childhood teddy bear had survived our house fire and was brought in along with some other things from our storage containers. I had Teddy cleaned and looking like new. He has no eyes left, but I think he sees plenty!

I regret little except saying I love you more to the kids, to my parents and grandparents. I regret the arguments I've had with some, the way I took offense when I should have walked away. I don't regret being generous with my heart or with my love. It always comes back ten fold.

I pray I won't leave the tree up until Easter like we did one year. I marvel that I actually got so busy with my Real Estate business that I let that happen. I think the rest of the family somehow thought it was my responsibility to get it down, and eventually I did, after my 10-year old told me he couldn't invite any of his friends over anymore because it was so weird to see that dead drooping tree in our living room.

I hope my children will soften their opinion and remembrance of me, like the fuzzy pictures the "Glamour Shots" do that smooth out all the wrinkles in our skin and make our eyes and hair glow like diamonds. I'd like to be remembered as larger than life, a family legend that brings forth lots of tall tales and exaggerations of the fantastique! We've made a tradition of that, like most of you do as well, telling the crazy stories of us, and how we all survived the craziness, the wonder and beauty of just being alive.

I hope you experience everything you wish for and everything you really need. I hope you live long and well, love hard and forgive more than you love. I hope that all the miracles of the season, and the good fortune available to you will fall like sugar crystals all around you.

And that you live in the magic of love and what love can bring for the rest of your life. I plan to do all I can to enhance that experience with my stories, if you'll take the time to read them.

With love,
Sharon

AND NOW THE MADNESS BEGINS - OR DOES IT???

Some of you understand what it's like to be a romance writer during the holidays. Those family get-togethers turn bizarre in a heartbeat, don't they? I know as a child, the weirder and weirder it got, the better I liked it.

My Grandma Fox had trouble swallowing, due to a series of strokes she'd suffered that left half of her body paralyzed. It never failed that for each big family meal, she'd start choking on something, and there were more than a few moments of tension when she'd remove her false teeth, leave them on the side of the plate on the beautiful table my mother always set, with all the finest crystal and china. Grandfather would stand up, and slap her back while she leaned over her dish and expelled whatever had gotten stuck.

She was beet red afterwards, sincerely ashamed for the spectacle. My grandfather never swore, but he could be heard saying something like, "Ah, Shaw," and we filled in the blanks. We were used to her drooling, and she wore a little purse affixed to her wrist with a strap, lovingly made by one of the ladies in the church, which contained a couple pretty hankies she used all day long. In fact, she was always with a hankie in her hand.

My other grandfather would go off on some political tangent, sure that the whole country was going to Hell quickly, and often we'd wake up Christmas morning to find that he'd had such a difficult time sleeping, they'd packed up in the middle of the night and drive the long way home to Fresno, California. Yes. I was born in Fresno. A good place to be from.

The stories were exaggerated, as family stories go. I'd heard them every year. Every year they'd get more and more fantastic, and I didn't care if they came from morphing, or told by people who always instructed me to take the moral high ground and never lie. They were family stories, and as such, were exempt from the normal constraints of reality. It was a kind of better than the truth: it was fiction. Was there something wrong with me for preferring the morphing stories of our family history? And does it really matter anyway?

By candlelight, those tales were told, passed down from the mouths of people now long gone. And I think I must do some of the same.

We always enjoyed visiting my aunt and uncle in San Francisco. My uncle could have made it as a comedian, he was so good with his jokes. Especially during the years when he was drinking. Afterward, he was just as funny, by the way. As an insurance salesman, he had stories of all the creative ways he got past the secretaries who tried to screen him from seeing the execs he wanted to sell to. He called it his Zippo Success Institute.

Between my uncle and my grandfather, the preacher, I learned what it was like to sell. In one case, it was a safety net to cheat death's impact on a family, in the other, redemption and a life everlasting. But trust me, it required a good salesman to do either. I knew long before I married and started having kids that life is one sales job after another. Raising children or being long time married, it's still the same thing to me today.

So I guess the madness of the season isn't really that for me, is it? I can get behind the crowds, though I don't participate in it. I don't mind people selling things, even things I don't need. I get caught up in it just like I did as a child. The stories, the pitch given to inspire change, the way to figure out problems and not get stuck by them, how to alter another's opinion with a smile or the right choice of words. Life is sales.

If it weren't so, we wouldn't take this most sacred of holidays, and turn it into one huge gift giving bonanza in this country. The idea of giving a gift is doing the unexpected. To show to someone what the inside of our heart looks like, to make the act one of love.

I don't remember the gifts, but I remember the love. Yes, sometimes I remember the pain too. I don't remember the words, but I remember the story. I remember what it felt like and how it feels now.

That gift is one I shall cherish forever.