HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

 SO glad to be Back in the Bucket after sometime  at the Brigham in Boston.

It is a great hospital and I am grateful that I can go there for procedures and surgeries.

But I am grateful to be back in my home and awaiting the first big storm of the year.

This really feels like Xmas to me and brings me back to the Xmas times of my childhood.

I recall one  Xmas when my mother waited until near Xmas  Eve to purchase a tree. I was so afraid that  we were not going to get one,  Then she told me to dress warmly and walk with her to a place where she had noticed trees for sale. It was a freezing night in December  but I was happy to  go. We left my two sisters alone and we  looked up to the second floor tenement  windows where they were  both watching us and waving happily.

When we arrived we had walked  what seemed to me a long way in the wind and blowing snow. We went up Columbus Avenue and there he was a man with a few lopsided and skinny trees  standing in a bare spot next to the railroad tracks on York Avenue. He was closing shop and clearly did not expect  to sell these  neglected and rejected trees.

My mother told him that she  had only 5 dollars. Could he sell her a tree for that  price?

He looked at her and me shivering in the wind  and he picked the scrawniest of a scrawny bunch and tied it up for us and took the five dollars. Then my mother  picked up the  trunk end and  I held  onto the  top of the tree and we retraced our steps. 

 When we got to our house on Englewood Avenue, we looked up and my sisters were watching for us still.  We waved and they came running down the front stairs to  help and the four of us  hauled  that tree inside. I said that we had waited to the  last moment. She laughed and said yes and in two days we could pick out a better one from  trees thrown out  the day after Xmas.  

We laughed and said  that we would keep ours for the Twelve Days of Christmas.  AND WE DID.