I'll be Home For Christmas...

Chris and I found this old sled at a yard sale in July and brought it home. I took one look at it and saw it decorated with greens at Christmas and placed somewhere close enough to the door to make me smile when I came home each day.

Home. Home for Christmas. When I was a kid and heard that song, I could not digest the line, "If only in my dreams." Because if one were not home for Christmas, where would one be? I didn't realize that people packed up thier childhood memories and went on to create new ones. In my mind the now and the future we welded together and WOULD NOT CHANGE. I could not imagine a holiday without the chaos of five kids and a smelly dog in the house my father built. Could not fathom that we would not all gather at the country church on Christmas eve to hold a drippy white candle and sing Silent Night. I could not imagine a Christmas without my grandparents arriving with plastic laundry baskets filled to the brim with boxes wrapped in white tissue paper, my grandmothers perfect penmanship spelling out the gift recipients names on the face of the package. I could not imagine a holiday where car loads of aunts and laughing cousins didn't arrive and fill the house with noise and excitement. If I was not home where would I be?

In my wildest imagining I never realized that one day all that embodied Christmas to me as a child would be just that, a dream. A memory as sweet as a candy cane clutched in a sticky fist. I didn't know that I could create new dreams, new traditions. I didn't know that someday home would be somewhere other than the place where the 7 D's lived in the house in the trees. I didn't know it could get even sweeter.