O' Christmas tree...
This Christmas I have my first own Christmas tree. Not a real one, but a very good fake 50% off from Lowes :-) and it is my first artificial tree.
I remember Christmas across the years, across the miles, home, when in the old traditional way Dad and I were decorating the real pine tree (that my Dad usually brings from the woods), in the eve of Christmas (and then keep it till January after the feast of Baptism of the Lord). We had old and new decorations, some since I was a little child. The house was cleaned and smelled like food that was cooking on our wood burning stove. We always were remembering old times, and were making wishes.
Today I decorate my artificial Christmas tree with decorations gatherd over the years sent by my firends, and I remembered them with tears of joy in my eyes. I even did not know I have so many little angels, and teddy bears, and other little ornaments. I still have the ones I used in my little on-call room in Buffalo, ceap silk-wrapped globes (for some reason Taylor liked those the most, thinking they are little balls to play with). Ms. Barbara has sent me every Christmas little angels from AZ, they are so beautiful!
By the time I was not a little child anymore every year when it came about "My Christmas wish" we were laughing and remembering my wishes as a child. Then my parents in a choir with big smiles reminding me the usual beginning of my child-times wish "When I will have lots of money..."
This Christmas I still have the same wish as every year since I was 6 years old:
- "WHEN I WILL HAVE LOTS OF MONEY, I will have a ranch in Texas with a big red barn, and lots of horses, and a creek running through my own forest. I will have a big house with a real fire place, dogs, and cats cuddled up in large window sills. And I will have cows and chickens, and will go horseback hunting (but not kill the deers). I will go in the fields and gather herbs for tee, and drink it in cold winter days. I will cut my own wood, and live happily ever after."
I grew up with the old Cowboy movies that somehow always were taking place in Texas, and men were wearing those big Texas hats, riding white or black horses, and gathering wild horses or cattles. That was something to dream about :-)
It's interesting that after so many years my dream is still alive and is always my Christmas wish. Here I am doing a very intellectual work (teaching, doing research, hopefully publishing :-)) and my only dream is to have a ranch with a red barn and horses. Once, the time I was soul searching my career path, I read a book in what the author said that you should do the job of your dreams. Even today the job of my dreams is to be on a farm a cowgirl... and I ended up somehow completing a Ph. D. in Educational Psychology. At least if it would have been in Veterinary medicine I could take care of those horses :-)
But there is no better Christmas wish than the one I had in childhood and started with "When I will have lots of money..."
Isn't that red barn wonderful? Isn't that the perfect Christmas wish? :-)
