Advent Calendar: Ornaments

I'm late with my 3rd Advent Calendar installment. Finals are coming up, papers are due!

Anyway, here it is, with the instructions from Geneabloggers:

Did your family have heirloom or cherished ornaments? Did you ever string popcorn and cranberries? Did your family or ancestors make Christmas ornaments?

When I was young we had some of the old fashioned glass ornaments which dated from early in my parents' marriage (16 July 1937). There was a house, and a car, and a bird, a Christmas tree, and a bell. They were not very big, but I loved them. When my mother and I lived in an apartment during the 1960s, when I was in high school, someone broke into our storage cabinets, in the complex's carport, and broke every last one of them. Why people feel like they have to destroy the property of people they don't even know is way beyond me. Ever since, I have fondly remembered and pined for those ornaments.

We have since bought other glass ornaments which I also love. Every year we try to buy one new ornament, sometimes we have done so on our travels, so we remember those trips anew at Christmastime. Sometimes we buy ornaments to represent events we have enjoyed. We have a couple Jacksonville Jaguars (local NFL football team) ornaments, commemorating the first three years, when we had season tickets. We have a couple of Coast Guard ornaments, too, as my husband and I both served in the Coast Guard. And we have handmade ornaments sent by friends. All of these bring wonderful memories and associations at Christmastime.
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My book is out!

My husband came in this evening bearing a rather heavy box that had been left on our doorstep. It was addressed to me and when I opened it, there were 10 copies hot off the press of my new book,Non-Federal Censuses of Florida, 1784-1945: A Guide to Sources, available from McFarland. The link takes you to the page where you can see a photo of the cover. I'm very pleased with it.

I'll take some of those copies and give them to libraries -- the genealogy departments of the Clay County Library and the Jacksonville Public Library main branches, the library of the University of North Florida, where I'm a student, and the library of the Southern Genealogist's Exchange Society, of which I'm a member.

Nice to see a real product at the end of a few years of work! Now to get to work on the next one!
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Advent Calendar: Breakfast!

Well, not really breakfast -- I guess you could call it "pre-breakfast." It has been a tradition since our daughters were babies that I make hot rolls on Christmas morning and serve them with hot chocolate, to be consumed while we are delving into our stockings.

For the first many years, I made cinnamon rolls. But at about the age of 15 our younger daughter developed a true allergy to cinnamon. She can't even smell the stuff or her breathing passages swell up in an anaphylactic reaction. It has the potential of being fatal. All cinnamon left the house at that time, and hasn't been back. So for the past twenty and more years it has been orange rolls. I use a recipe from the Better Homes and Gardens bread cookbook. If I ever fail to make the rolls, the reaction is swift and sure!

So we eat our fresh-from-the-oven orange rolls and drink our homemade hot chocolate (from Hershey's cocoa powder) while we see what silly things have been stuffed in our stockings. Then it's time for real breakfast, and then the opening of the main presents.
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Advent Calendar: The Ersatz Christmas Tree

Back in the 1970s, when our daughters were small children, we had bad economic times. The economy was doing what it pretty much as been doing, again, these past couple years. We had very little money that year for Christmas, and in order to be able to afford some presents, mainly for our kids, we did not buy a Christmas tree.

But my husband very much wanted one. So he came up with a ridiculous solution: he went out into the yard and cut a raintree sapling. Not hard to come by -- the raintree that grew in the back yard, though it was beautiful to look at, was a wanton among trees. It reproduced with great abandon, to the point that the most prolific weed in our yard was raintree saplings! He stripped the sapling of its few spindly branches. He cut a bunch of ligustrum branches. We had no problem attacking the ligustrum -- we hate the nasty things. These branches were tied or otherwise affixed to the raintree sapling.

And there was our tree -- ridiculous to look at, but decorated to the nines, anyway. We laughed at the poor thing then, and we still laugh about it today, when we recall how, despite being scrawny and jury-rigged, it brightened what could have been a dismal holiday season. I do have a photo of it, but with papers and final exams looming, and being sick the past couple days, I have not had time to hunt for it.

The poor thing is long gone, but it still keeps on giving us joy every time we remember it and laugh.
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