monkeymom's Diaryland Diary
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what a laugh it would have been if Daddy had only seen...
It still hasn't snowed here, in fact it's warm and rainy, so it doesn't look much like Christmas, but Sunday night was Luminaria night in our neighborhood. Every year the houses on Stephenson St (one block North of us, the street with all the big old houses) light all their outdoor Christmas lights and line the sidewalk with luminarias and invite everyone in the surrounding neighborhoods to come out and walk and enjoy it. Somehow it spread to our street, too, so it makes a nice circuit of about 6 blocks that are all lit up on the that night.
Rich and Kim put cat litter in the bottom of brown paper bags to weight the bags and then they put those little stubby (votive) candles on top of the cat litter. This year it has been raining so the ground is wet, and I thought it would soak through the bags and get the cat litter soggy - we usually pour the cat litter into the cat box after luminaria night. Richard cut up small plastic trash bags into squares and put a square of plastic under each bag to protect them so we can re-use the cat litter. He's either really clever or really cheap, maybe a little of both.
Kim went out with him to help set up the bags and he must have let her light some of the candles while he came back in to get more bags, because she came in the house looking a little embarrassed and said she needed another bag because she accidently set one on fire!
So when our lights were all lit, we took the dog with us, and went out to stroll through the neighborhood and enjoy the display. It really did look good, and we took a detour down another block because that street was lit up, too. When we were almost back to our house, we found the street blocked by a crowd who had gathered at a house where the family had friends over and were caroling and passing out cookies and hot chocolate! We couldn't get past them easily, so we walked another block and were going to turn to go to our street, but then we heard some Ho Ho Ho-ing, so we kept going on down the street and there was a man dressed as Santa out in front of his house, passing out those little foil-wrapped chocolates shaped like Santas and trees. By the time we got back to our house we had walked well over a mile, and it was misty out, so we were all a little damp and chilly.
This year we actually have outdoor Christmas lights because as soon as people started putting up their outdoor lights, Kim decided we had to have some, too, and Rich finally agreed that he would put some on the bushes but he said he wouldn't crawl all over the house to hang out lights. So we went shopping for outdoor Christmas lights, and he and Kim put them on the bushes, so she's happy about that. That led to her wanting to get a Christmas tree put up, too. So we dragged out and bought a tree from the pile in front of the grocery store, and tied it to the luggage rack on top of the van with bungee cords and drove it home. We don't usually do this until closer to Christmas, but it's been up for a week already. When I mentioned it to Scott, he was shocked! He said, "What?? We never put up a tree this early!" So I explained about shopping for outdoor lights and how the trees in the store were beautiful so Kim thought we needed to put ours up, and he said, "What?? You have outdoor lights? AND you already put up the Christmas tree?? What else are you doing with Kim now that we're gone?" I told him that Kim is an only child now, so we do whatever she wants.
7:34 p.m. - 2001-12-16
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