Christmas Memory

I'm not a summer person and I never really was. I don't look forward to summer anymore. I look forward to winter. Summer is too hot and too humid and too noisy for me, especially now that I'm older. My favorite season is fall — and it always was — and then winter, and some of my favorite cold-weather memories are about Christmas.

There hasn't been anything under my Christmas tree except the tree stand for the past five or six years but Christmas presents are not the reasons I still put up a tree every year in the den, right in front of the big sliding-glass door that opens onto the big back "patio/porch".

The biggest reason for putting up a Christmas tree is to share the experience of looking at it with someone you care about and who needs to feel happy and cheerful about beautiful bright lights and a warm, safe home. And I get to do that every year. That's my Christmas present. Sharing the cheerful bright tree lights and feeling good about the most beautiful holiday of the year. That's why I never watch the Hallmark Channel. I like to be happy at Christmas. Not sad.

And, no, this isn't a painting by Edvard Munch. And this is not the way my hometown really looked when they strung all those big colored light bulbs back and forth across the main street downtown, when I was just a boy. This is how it looks whenever I try to remember it. The best Christmas is always the present one and then the next one.

Thinking Back

The older I get the more I discover "previously unused" sections of my brain. I'm glad I get to discover them before somebody else does. Then I can clear away the old cobwebs and see if there's something nice under there or just more dormant or dead brain cells that are better left untouched. This kind of "housework" sure beats sitting around in an old recliner drinking a glass of milk and biting the ears off discounted chocolate Easter bunnies, wishing they were a 16-oz. can of beer and a couple of chicken quesadillas instead.  

In this case, it's really not an unused section. I've used this section before. First in high school, and then I had to let it hide until the 1980s when I did some drawings and paintings with tangible media like chalk pastels, crayon pastels, charcoal, charcoal pens, pen & ink, canvas, canvas board, watercolor paper, cardboard, poster board and all kinds of paint brushes, bristle and foam rubber, using watercolors and acrylic paints.

Then this section of my brain went unused again until 1994 when I did a charcoal-and-brush self-portrait. I stowed that artwork away for a rainy day. Then I forgot all about that brain section until February 7, 2013 when I started painting with a regular computer mouse. There are still some cobwebs on that section of my brain but I try to clean house there on a regular basis now. There's no telling what I might find there. Which makes me kind of glad that this previously unused sections of my brain was just hiding and didn't go missing altogether.