Tea Party

Cin’s Feb Challenge:

Day 8 – Tea Party

Day 9 – Brag about yourself or something you are doing

For most people (I think) it’s an uncomfortable thing to brag about yourself, and I believe that I don’t do that a lot.  However, I could be wrong, because isn’t this blog just one great big brag session??  I guess it is what it is.

This is a picture I painted in 1997.  Yes.  Seventeen years ago.  Amazing fact – it has survived seventeen years worth of de-cluttering.  I spent a lot of time on all the fiddly details and it was one of my first tole paintings ever, but that’s not why I love it.

It reminds me of the relationship I have with my younger sister Ann, the one closest to me in age.  (There are almost ten years between me and our youngest sibling, and a fifteen year old doesn’t set spending time with a five-year old as one of her priorities.)  So the tea parties I remember are the ones where Ann and I played at being civilized grown ups for as long as we could stand it, before taking off outside again to act like the little hooligans we really were.

My hair was dark and straight as a poker and I was always jealous of Ann’s Shirley Temple curls.  Mom dressed me in red while my sister got to wear beautiful blues and chocolate browns.  I would (of course) be the one in charge of the tea-pot and the slicing of the cake, because I was older and bigger and incredibly bossy. I’m not like that AT ALL anymore.  Just ask my sisters, and they had better agree with me.

One of these fine days I will get back into painting.  For awhile I rented a display space at a little store called “Rose Tree Cottage” and sold a lot of my stuff there.  I still have the records somewhere of all the things I painted, and they number in the hundreds.  When it became more like work and less like fun I just stopped doing it.  When I have all kinds of time on my hands and no job to go to I will set up a little ‘studio’ again and see what happens, and what magical memories are still stored away in my old and muddled up mind.

There are all kinds of flaws in this tea party painting.  I could point them out to you if you haven’t already noticed them, but sometimes I think it’s the imperfections in things that make them good.  And dear.  And worth hanging on to for seventeen years.

It’s Never Too Early (or Too Late) for Christmas Cheer

Christmas in the post-War United States (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What a long day this has been – and it’s not over yet.  Not until I’ve finished my mug of Christmas Cheer.  I’m rewarding myself for making poor choices.  I decided tonight would be a good time to pick up some stocking stuffers, after working until 8:00 p.m. Most sane people would have headed home by then, wouldn’t you think?  It is now going on eleven o’clock.  I’ve been out there mingling with the crazies.

Actually it’s nobodys fault but my own for taking so long.  I have a really hard time making up my mind about things, as if the fate of the world rests on my decisions.  As long as there’s something funny and something to rot their teeth, kids are generally happy with whatever they get.  I know that.  But it doesn’t stop me from agonizing over things like tooth-brush colors.  Because God Forbid someone should get a green one when they prefer purple.

Even though they come in only one color, I hope no one is going to ask me for a hippopotamus this year.  I’d gladly sing the song for them though.  This has been one of my favourite Christmas songs forever.  No Christmas is complete without hearing it at least once, preferably by someone other than yours truly.  Enjoy.