Tag: Christmas tree

The Owl in the Christmas Tree

 This week in the US News, a story unfolded that is just too cute for the Christmas season. A small saw-whet owl rode two hours from Oneonta, New York to Rockefeller Center, New York City.  The tiny and photogenic creature is now living in a box in Saugerties, New York until it can be released tomorrow.

I have a special fondness for this story, having spent five years in Oneonta. Oneonta is a small town sitting at the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, known for its university (SUNY Oneonta) and its summer little league baseball tournaments. It’s a charming town of old houses and a park full of evergreens; it’s a quirky town with an eclectic mix of stores in its downtown.

Oneonta is a place where there should be Christmas stories. Nothing quite as virginal as a Hallmark Christmas movie, but maybe a Lifetime movie with its more complicated line set to a white Christmas. 

So fitting it is that a tiny owl in a lopsided tree would venture forth from there and find itself in the big city. 

Someone will write a children’s book about this. I wish it would be me, but I don’t write children’s books. I hope it’s an Oneonta native, for there are many artsy sorts in the foothills of the Catskills. I would read that book, and possibly try to get it signed with my other autographed children’s books.


This post wouldn’t be complete without a picture:


The Christmas We Make

I’m sitting on my couch in a room transformed into the Christmas my husband and I never felt we had. Both of us had mothers with illnesses, especially around the high-stress times of Christmas, and we tiptoed through the house hoping not to aggravate things. So now we have stockings (hanging on a windowsill; our mantle is a fake fireplace and scaled to make the stockings look ridiculous). We have greenery and seasonal stuffed toys and a now-collectable Avon Christmas train tree that plays tinny Christmas carols. And a tree, lit like my tree in my childhood was, with little multicolored lights. (These modern lights are a bit day-glo, but I’m okay with that).

We play Christmas music almost non-stop. One thing I didn’t know about my husband when I met him is that he has an ever-growing set of Christmas albums on iTunes. Right now, it’s cool jazz; I’m looking forward to some classical pieces on the soundtrack.

This is where some would piously import that trees and such aren’t the real meaning of Christmas. I would argue against this; the real meaning of Christmas is celebration. Let people celebrate the spirit of good that they will. Richard and I celebrate recovery from painful childhoods, among other things. We celebrate that we can make a Christmas for ourselves.

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I really apologize for the test note blog yesterday — I was testing to see if IFTTT could submit a post announcement to Twitter and Facebook so I could quit the extra step of using Hootsuite to post. (Note: It can’t.) Ten of you actually read the post, which is really nice of you.)