herbiehancock

  As a little girl, I remember how my Mom liked to bake year round, but between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day, she was in a baking frenzy.  She baked batch after batch of cookies of all kinds.  She made rolled and sliced refrigerator cookies, drop cookies like chocolate chip and peanut butter, cut-out sugar cookies, and cookies shaped like trees and wreaths and stars made with a cookie press and decorated with colored sugars.  She made nut balls, cinnamon snicker doodles , miniature pecan tarts , date pinwheels , chocolate coconut filled cookies, and M&M cookies. For Christmas each year, she also made several different kinds of candy.  She made chocolate-covered cherries, million dollar fudge with walnuts in it, buckeyes , peanut brittle, and pink divinity made from strawberry or raspberry flavored powdered Jello gelatin mix.  There were some years when she also made chocolate covered coconut candy from mashed potatoes and chocolate covered mint ...

We put up our Christmas tree this weekend as you can see in the picture above.  Doing so brought back memories of putting up the tree at home with my family when I was a child.  The following paragraphs relate some of those memories. When I was a kid, the Christmas season began when my Dad went up in the attic above our garage and hauled down the big brown cardboard box that held the artificial Christmas tree.   We assembled and put up that tree every year.  He'd bring the box in to the living room where we had already moved the furniture around to make room for the tree.  Mom always wanted the tree in front of the window so that the lights from it could be seen from outside.  We'd put the naked, green, wooden pole (that looked like a broom handle and that served as the tree trunk) into the tree stand and screwed it in tight.  Then Dad would sort out the branches by size and by the colors painted on the stems.   Every year during this proces...

Guess what! I'm still here. It has been a very busy week, and I've had to put blogging on the back burner for a while. So I'm popping in to post here finally. Thank you to those who have emailed and contacted me this week. It's nice to know my blogging friends are thinking of me, and I appreciate all of you. It is so nice that you care. I am still around, and I'm doing fine. I've been a little overwhelmed lately, but I am fine. (Well, actually, I did break a mirror this week. So I guess I'm in for seven years of bad luck? Other than that I'm fine though.) * * * * * Today was a busy day. My brother and two of his sons were here to help me sort through some things in my mother's house. So much we accumulate over a lifetime. In the end they are all just things, none of much importance really. More important are the memories that are attached to the things. I was sorting through old photographs and letters that my parents had saved. I relived a ...

Chris from the blog, At Home At Last , recently wrote about her first memory. I thought it was an interesting thing to blog about, so I thought I would write about mine here. * * * * * Until I was around the age of three, I lived with my family in a house in the town of Marion, Ohio. I have two main memories from that long ago time in my life. The first memory was of a fire that we had there. My mom was cooking something on the stove in the kitchen in a big iron skillet. I don't remember what she was making, but she must have been frying something in the skillet in oil. The oil got too hot and caught on fire. (With three children all under the age of five at the time, I imagine she had gotten distracted by one of us which kept her away from the stove too long.) I was in the living room and heard my mother let out a sort of half scream, half yelp kind of noise in the kitchen. I wandered in there to see what was going on. My brother and sister showed up there, from w...