Saturday, December 02, 2006

Saturday Sky

Saturday dawned clear and cold, and the best part of that is I knew we wouldn't have to get up and get out in it. The ground was covered with a heavy frost. It looked much worse than this picture shows.



Something about winter, and coldness makes the skies this time of year so blue. There are lots of songs and poems about blue summer skies, but to me, nothing beats a winter sky for color.




Cody woke up feeling much better, though he still had a touch of fever and headache. He tried to get up and help with the Christmas tree, but just wasn't up to it.

He did manage to get up long enough to hang his family bell but that was all he could manage.


Having a Family Bell is a tradition that dates back to my childhood. When I was growing up, we each had a shiny blue plastic bell with our initial on it, even our parents. It was tradition that my dad would film us--with the old 8mm movie camera since that was before the days of camcorders--hanging our bell each year. Then my mother would film my dad hanging his. She never knew how long to film, so every year my dad hung his bell, stood there a minute, then said, "Ok, that's enough," or "that's good" or whatever. This clearly showed up in the home movies.

Hanging a family bell was almost a sacred ritual in our house, and we kids lived in abject terror of messing it up--either by not being able to find a place to hang it, or horror of horrors dropping our bell. Imagine our mirth the year when DAD dropped his bell. We thought it was so funny that the next year we egged him on to drop his bell again. Lo and behold, he did it. I kind of half think he dropped it on purpose, but he would never admit to it.

At first, there were just the four of us. We each had a shiny blue bell, to which my mother had added an initial with glue and glitter. When my sister came along, there was one blue bell left. My mother kept saying she was going to put Deana's initial on her bell, but never got around to it. To this day, my sister's bell doesn't have her initial--and she's 36 now. Then came my younger brother. By the time he was born, there were no more bells. My parents tried to buy another set of bells, but it seemed nobody made those particular style of bells any more. Scott ended up with a purple bumply plastic bell instead of a shiny blue one. But it was his family bell.

Suddenly, I was an adult with a son of my own. We were still in Italy when his first Christmas rolled around, so I went to the Navy Exchange to try to find us some family bells. They had some lovely little glass bells that had different clappers. I bought one for Cody with a Santa Claus clapper, and one for me with a partridge clapper. Those were our family bells until year before last. As I was taking mine out of the box, the hanging thing broke off. No big deal, I would just glue it back on. I had the glue gun all out and heated up, but when I picked up my bell, it felt like something jerked it out of my hand. It was the weirdest thing. Needless to say, my bell shattered into about a gazillion pieces.

Since then, I've been looking to find another set of family bells, but I just haven't found anything that is right. For the moment, I am without a family bell.

Well, we got the tree finished, though I did most of the decorating myself. That's when I realized that we didn't have any garland. Our garland had gotten kind of ratty, so I threw it away last year after Christmas. I'd forgotten about it until today. And that meant another trip into Wal-mart.




Look! There are even a few presents under it!

With today's installment of the


a pattern begins to emerge:



Perhaps it is a holiday bell...perhaps something else.

Time will tell...

1 comment:

Bag Blog said...

Family traditions are so cool. I really like the bell tradition. Now, I will be on the watch for bells.