And Christmas is almost here again!

It is almost 5:00 AM.  Coffee is perking.  The cat is fighting me for the keyboard and life is good.  I woke up a while ago and thought back to the Christmas seasons on 5th street.  I was divorced with my little nest full of babies and they always expected Santa to come.  I was not much into church back then.  Kind of hard to work God in when I was working a full time job and 2 part time jobs to put food on the table.  I did make sure the kids got on the bus for church every Sunday.  At least most of the time.  OK.  Some of the time,  but that was a rough time for me.

So anyway, I tried to have money put aside for Christmas, and usually did.  If not there was always the credit card and that was used more often then not for Christmas.  Nothing else. I recall the first year.  I really thought Duane would come and help me, but he didn't.  I ended up the afternoon of Christmas Eve doing the shopping for Santa.  Talk about a joke.  The shelves were bare and pickings were very slim, but I ended up with my car loaded.  Not sure anyone got anything they wanted, but they did get to unwrap presents on Christmas Day.  I vowed that the next year would be better and it was, kind of.

That year I splurged and bought each of the girls a bike and Sam a trike.  By the end of Christmas Day every tire on the bikes was flat.  I heard the rumor that Sam did it because he was jealous that he did not get one, but Lord only knows what the truth was in that case.  The next year they got Susie for Christmas, the gift of a failed reconciliation.  At least they did not flatten her and she was actually kind of cute.  Debbie, Patty, and Dona wanted to take her for "show and tell" and Sam just wanted her gone.  Take her to school and leave her was fine with him.

Christmas Dinner was varied.  Sometimes it was turkey and all that stuff.  Once it was ham.  One year I let the kids choose and we had corn dogs.  I can not eat a corn dog now without thinking back to that day.  I made red chile once.  I think Coloradans call it chile beans.  I did not know what green chile was back then.

Time kind of runs together back in those days.  Seems like I was always in a money crunch, but that is what 5 kids and no education will do for you.  If I had it to do over again, I would, but there would be some rules laid down on the first date.  I strongly suspect I would not have had 5 kids, but I am not sure which ones I would send back.  In later years they had welfare programs, to help with mothers like me, but at that time it was either sink or swim.  I paid $15 a week for child care and I had some doozies.  Ida May was a friend of mom's.  She always had a pocket full of candy for the kids.  She also had a full beard so they were afraid of her.  Mrs. McIvers lasted a few months.  Then there was a lady on 6th street, but her kids were meaner than shit!  I finally found Mrs Benson, who moved across town to be close.  At the time she seemed like the answer, but now I hear horror stories.  We did survive though.

Back to Christmas.  Christmas of 2002 found Kenneth in Colorado Springs on life support.  He had been in the hospital since Thanksgiving.  Our 20th Anniversary was December 23, so I spent the night at Semper Care.  I spent a lot of nights there .  Christmas was pretty sad that year.  He died the end of January 30, 2003. Christmas has never been the same since.  Probably never will be.  Seems I always get weepy this time of year.  Hell, it seems the older I get the more weepy I get.  I tried dating a couple times, but that did not turn out well.  The first one died about the time I got to really know him.  The second one was just a jerk.  There are a lot of those out there, so I am giving up on that.

There is no tree in my house.  No decorations.  I will spend Christmas Eve at church for the morning service and the evening service.  That is how I want it.  I think this Christmas I may get out the box of cards I got when Kenny passed and read them one more time.  I have not opened that box since he died.  I may go through Mother's box also.  But who knows.  This may be the year I do something wild and crazy.  I do know that unless it snows, I will be taking a long walk along the ditch.  It is quiet there.

Surely we will talk again between now and then, but just in case, I am going to tell you

Merry Christmas and a Happy New year and grab all the happiness you can while you can!

A sharecropper Christmas or Gibby is gone, but the memories are not.

There were eight of us living in a lathe and plaster house where the snow blew in sometimes because there were chinks in the plaster, but Christmas was always Christmas.  It was the one holiday a year that really mattered in that 2 bedroom house at 709 Strong Street in Nickerson, Kansas.  There were 3 things that would happen that day without fail.  Santa Clause would have stopped by in the middle of the night, Dad would stay sober and  there would be a meal on the table.  The wheels of progress had started probably the Christmas before when Mother started counting her pennies and making the list of what each one of us would receive. She always had a stub of a pencil and a list in her pocket. I never really got a good look at that list, but I am sure my name had appeared there some where.   All year she worked towards that one goal.  Mother's do that, or at least mine did.
School got out for vacation about a week before Christmas.  Every classroom had a Christmas tree. and every tree had tinsel.  The last day before vacation started was the day to "take down the tree."  The tree then went home with who ever did not have a tree up yet.  We counted on getting one.  There were 6 of us little urchins and the teachers would decide.  We always got one!  I remember the year I was the lucky recipient.  Can you imagine my pride at dragging that tree home the whole mile to our house.  I was so damn proud I thought I would pop!  And the teacher had left all the tinsel on it.  Of course by the time I got it home the tinsel had thinned quite a bit on the side that was dragging in the dirt.  I thought I would pop my buttons when momma propped that tree up and Christmas was on the countdown!
We did not have stockings, but rather we wrote our name on a piece of paper and placed it where we wanted Santa to put our gifts.  Funny, I don't really remember ever giving my mother a gift in all those growing up years.  I made her cards, but never a physical gift.  And then there was the time I babysat and earned some money and went to Doc Wards store and got her a stainless steel mixing bowl.  I did that because I had broken her glass one and felt really bad about that.  Well, when I grew up and moved away I would send her stuff, but that really doesn't count.
As the years went by and mother picked up more house cleaning jobs the piles grew bigger at Christmas.  The first one I remember was a coloring book, colors, a red rubber ball, and an orange.  The last Christmas I remember Santa Clause was when my brother woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me he had helped mom and dad put out the gifts and there was no Santa Clause.  That year I got one of those tin doll houses that clipped together.  You know, the miniature ones with mother, father, sister and brother and all the tiny furniture and you could buy more!  And always there was new underwear and socks!  Wise mother to make the piles bigger with stuff we had to have anyway!
And then it was my turn to be Santa.  In all fairness, I do not remember much about those years.  The kids dad and I divorced when the kids were small and he was good at bringing presents, but not much for the child support.  His reasoning was that I had the kids and all the pleasure they brought so why should he have to pay me?  He was the one with not kids to keep him company and in my warped mind I saw the reasoning that made him tick!
I was always a procrastinator and sometimes Christmas got there before I realized that as Santa I had work to do!  One year my friend Gibby was kind enough to help with the last minute shopping the day before Christmas Eve mind you!  We rushed from store to store and finally had the trunk full.  The next evening I put the kids to bed and Gib came and we began to assemble the gifts, one of which was a tin miniature doll house for Debbie.  Luckily (?) he had brought a bottle of wine and luckier still that I had lots of band aids because those damn little tabs were very sharp and the wine was very strong!  Well, and there may have been a second bottle!  I woke up on the floor and no sign of Gib.
(An aside here, I must tell you about Gib.  He was a friend of my mothers and they worked at the Red Rooster together.  Gib was gay and one of the first to die in the AIDS epidemic, when it was an epidemic. He died in California and we never knew where he was buried.  I do know when I conceived the Pueblo AIDS Memorial Quilt  he was foremost in my mind and the first panel made was for my sweet Gibbie.)
Many years have passed and many Christmas's have come and gone to bring me to this Christmas.  I do not have a tree.  I gave all my lights and decorations to my son.  I do not buy gifts.  I do not fight the crowds.  I will spend Christmas Eve in church and Christmas Day I will attend church and come home.  I am not bah humbug at Christmas, I just prefer to live with my memories.  The best part of memories is that they can be altered to fit the occasion and this year I shall have beautiful memories of wonderful children and bountiful love and I wish you all the same!

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!  

Today fur shall fly!

Hey, I got me a helper coming this morning.  I am so excited.  I got 2 bookcases full of books up into my bedroom.  Got the little desk Sherman gave me up there, also.  One corner empty, one old lady worn out.  Took the day off yesterday and just chilled.  Well, took the kids to lunch, met a fellow at the library to help him with his computer, came home and emptied, or nearly emptied, the top of the china cabinet.  Then I took a bunch of pictures for eBay and then wove about 8 inches on my towels.  They are going to be absolutely beautiful.
Last night the phone rang and who do you think was on the other end?  Grandson Mikey!  Mom said grandma needed some help and he was just hanging out so he could sure come and give me a hand if I wanted him to!  So I got to get out of the pj's a little early today.  Oh, yeah, and the guy is coming for my furnace inspection so today is going to be pretty busy. 
I picked a color to paint and I think it is going to be alright.  Bedroom is purple, bathroom is pink, office is aqua, and the main level will be something called desert straw, unless I go with the chenille.  Either way, all the stuff has to come off the walls.  Seems like a never ending job here.  Really makes me long for the good old days back in Nickerson, when mother was in charge!
I do want to tell you about my Christmas's there.  Seems like the first one in that house was when Jake broke it to me that there was no such animal as "you know who" (in case some one is reading this to a little kid!).  Seems that was the first year that mom and dad let him have the job of bringing in the stuff and putting it on top of the pieces of paper with our names on them.  We needed our socks, man!  Could not be hanging those up for some fat guy to shove stuff in and stretching them out of shape.  Many years later I did have a stocking, but it was no big deal by that time.
I heard him sneaking back to his little bed in the middle of the night and asked where he had been.  So he told me.  And it seemed that he had proof.  I was getting a tin doll house that held tiny people and tiny furniture.  That was hard to believe because that seemed like something a rich kid would have gotten  I learned later why.  Seemed my dear Aunt Helen Lang had taken pity on us that year and wanted to make our Christmas special.  She sure did!  Aunt Helen would pop in from time to time in our lives and when she went away there was always wonderful stuff left behind.  Once she enrolled me in Brownie, which is the really beginning of Girl Scouts.  Even bought me a Brownie uniform.  I was so cool!  I had a little brown beanie for my head.  Do they still have Brownie's?  I need to research that. 
The next Christmas that I remember I did not fare nearly as well.  Seems there was a book of children's poems, a red rubber ball and an orange, oh, and that godawful candy that was dry powdered sugar and something and then dipped in chocolate or something that was meant to be chocolate.  The candy I liked was the ribbon candy that tasted like licorice.  It seemed that we always made the trip to Grandma Haas's in Plevna every Christmas.  It was a very long ways.  I think 23 miles.  And it seemed the car always over heated.
Any way we always had a Christmas tree.  The reason we had one was because at school every room had a Christmas tree and when school was over for the year, the tree went home with some one poor who needed it and with at least 4 kids in school there, one of us was bound to luck out.  And here we would go down the road with our poor little tree with a few strands of tinsel clinging to the branches as if we were the proudest people in the town. 
I would like to interject here, that I do not regret growing up in poverty.  At that time we were not the only poor people at the school.  Everyone was poor.  It was right after the depression and the war had just ended.  We did what we could and we all hung together.  That is how things were done in those days.  The best we could hope for was that the rich girls would get new clothes so we could have their old ones.  Jake fared the worst because boys wore their clothes until they fell to pieces so he never got any new "old" clothes.
I have yet to have a Christmas when I do not remember back to Nickerson.  Seems we always go back to our roots and no matter how far away I roam,  I am still "from Nickerson." There is probably no one living in Nickerson today that remembers those Bartholomew kids. I probably would not know them, because I am still remembering the people who were there when I was.
My poor little jumbled mind is ready for bed, so "Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!"

Colorado Avenue Antiques, Pueblo, Colorado

Wandered into the old Ambrosia Health Food building the other day and there was my little friends Ron Lombardi and Eric Gibson.  Seems they have bought the building which is 3 floors and done a ton of renovations.  The top floor is an apartment and since it is rented to an individual I could not see it, but I did see before and after pictures and it is fabulous.

The main level and the second level are full of antiques as you can see in the slide show.  The top level is thier antiques and the main level is leased to other people.  They are currently working on the Christmas room which features a silver pompom tree.  But don't tell them I ratted them off.

And across the street looking out the second floor is Netties Candies which I might like to visit.  If you notice the doors have many locks.  That is because it used to be a marijuana distributor.  But now it is an antique place and I love it. 

Colorado Ave. Antiques

112 Colorado Ave.

Pueblo, CO 81004

719-225-8293

Monday -Saturday 10-5

Sunday 12-4

Wonderful way to while away some time and remember the good old days.

***********************

To buy my novel click on the buy now button and you will receive an invoice.