holiday grand plan 2020

[Harmony]

I got all my boxes of decor down. Tree is up, which always means moving some furniture around too. We put the nativity picture up on the mantel.

Just for fun I googled minimalist Christmas decorating. Unbelievable. Not much color at all. A lot of white. A lot of trees with just a few ornaments and many without lights. Sometimes just a vase with a couple evergreen branches put in it. Everything very tastefully done, but I don't think I could do that, I was just curious. Every year I wonder how I can pare this down a bit. But I guess I'll never get to the minimalist look.

[Harriet]

We got lights on the tree. That's it. I've not been this far into Dec without decorating in ... .. decades?

Ordered some cards. Not excited about them. Let dd22 pick and her taste ran to sort of frivolous this time - I mean perfectly traditional, even old-fashioned, just more cute than meaningful. Small, which is fine. We'll use whatever stamps are already in the house. No idea about return address labels - maybe the ones I can print onto plain big label sheets and cut out. The cards were supposed to come in a day or two, now coming on Mon sometime. Sigh.

[Nancy]

I have a small tree up and some festive coffee cups out, red fabric under as a tree skirt, three cards up that is all.
No gifts wrapped under the tree. This has been normal the past several years.

[Harmony]

I got the Christmas dining room table cloth on. The centerpiece there. House looks good, it's tidy and I love the decorations. I'll wrap stuff tomorrow, the few gifts I have to wrap. And sit down and write the checks. I don't feel bad about not a lot of gifts. It's an odd time and I'm dealing with it the best I know how. Oh I have 2 people to figure out something for. Should not be hard, 1 stop somewhere. Need to think. After all this chaos around here, seems like I'll be able to pull it out anyhow.

Well, since nobody has posted since I last did, I'll put this update here.
We were sitting there in the family room and I heard a 'click' and looked over and on the bottom half of our 4' Christmas Tree, the colored lights that are part of the pre-lit lights went really really bright. I thought I was seeing something not real. Then about another 15 seconds later another 'click' and those lights went out. I checked the connections and that looked good. We tried shutting it off and restarting it 10 min later, still the same.

Just for fun I found the little booklet that came with the tree and DH looked at it, yes there is a fuse right at the plug end. It took a grand search to find the little box marked 'lights' for all the extra string lights and yes, fuses, that come with new strands. Ok, so with glasses, flashlight, dental pick, we managed to get the old fuses out and put two brand new ones in. The lights came back on for maybe half a second then back out. BooHoo.

I had no idea I was so attached to this little tree. DH says we will look closer at it when I take it down and there's no opportunity for knocking my glass stuff off. And..if we're not lucky we'll get one then or next year. So... for now it's still lit because I'd added a long string of white lights to brighten it up and they're still going on the bottom half. It still looks good enough. With the electronic tester kit DH checked those old fuses, both were still good, has to be another problem. How does something wear out when it just sits there? Planned obsolescence I guess!