Christmas trees, popcorn, and Pepper Girl…

The summer between my second and third grade my family moved into a new house in Covina Hills, California. Dad was a general contractor, and he had designed and built our new custom home. When we lived at that house, my parents enjoyed entertaining, especially during the holidays. And while we lived at that house—until I turned thirteen and we moved to Havasu—my parents would buy a flocked Christmas tree for the living room. (Flocked trees were super trendy back then.)

Mom would decorate the tree with gold and turquoise ornaments, and we didn’t help decorate the tree, as we had the trees from our earlier childhood. Mom was particular when it came to placing the tree ornaments.

While Mom’s tree was pretty, it wasn’t my thing. I liked the idea of the old-fashioned Christmas trees, with handmade ornaments and strings of popcorn.  So, my parents bought me my own little Christmas tree for my bedroom, one I could decorate myself. 

Fast forward to the first year of my marriage in 1976.  Don and I married in June of that year and moved into his apartment. The building didn’t allow animals. But one day at work, Don rescued a stray puppy who started chasing his truck. He tried to find the puppy a home. He did eventually—with us. We named her Pepper, and she was with us for 18 years.

It was as if Pepper knew we weren’t supposed to have animals at that apartment. She never barked when living there, and quietly used the dog door insert we attached to the glass door, so she could do her business on our small private patio. We lived in that apartment for less than a year, but we did celebrate one Christmas there.

That Christmas, Don’s and my first Christmas as a married couple, we bought a small tree and set it on a table next to the sofa and decorated it together. I remember I received my first Hallmark Ornament that year. Hallmark Christmas ornaments had only been around for three years at that time.

We also strung popcorn and cranberries for the tree. The proper way to string popcorn and cranberries, you string several inches of stale popcorn, and then one cranberry. Then the same amount of popcorn, another cranberry, and repeat.  

One evening before Christmas, I am sitting by the tree with Don, enjoying the fragrance of pine, and listening to Christmas carols, when I look over at our lovely little Christmas tree and notice something odd.  Instead of a strand of popcorn wrapping around the tree, there is just a string—with a cranberry every few inches.  

I take a closer look. All the popcorn had been removed from the string.  I look at our sweet Pepper, and I suddenly realize what must have happened. While we were at work, Pepper had jumped up on the sofa to get closer to the tree and then carefully nibbled off the popcorn. She did it without disturbing the tree. She didn’t tip it over or rip the string off the tree. No. She left the string with the cranberries wrapped around the tree while she enjoyed the popcorn.

Don and I had a good laugh. I was young, newly married, and hadn’t even considered the possibility of our unsupervised pup helping herself to the edibles on the tree while we were at work.  I appreciated the fact that she hadn’t tipped the tree over or knocked off any of the other ornaments. I was impressed. It was also the last year we put popcorn on our Christmas tree.

(Above Photos: Pepper, Me in front of Mom’s tree-1967, Me decorating my tree-1967.)

What’s in a name?

Thirty-two plus years ago I published a community magazine in the mountain and high desert communities of Wrightwood, Phelan, and Pinon Hills, California.  It was called Mountain/Hi-Desert Guide. I sold it (or more accurately gave it) to one of my employees around 1991, when our family had to leave Wrightwood and move to Havasu Palms, to help my parents with their business when Dad got sick.

I was the publisher and editor of the Guide for about seven years. This was before any of us had the Internet, before Google and Yahoo, and social media. It was even before digital photography.

Mountain/Hi-Desert Guide was a monthly publication, tabloid format on newsprint. It featured local events, a community calendar, interviews, articles of local history, and regular columns, such as one written by our local travel agent, and another by the local sheriff. 

Another one of the regular columns was entitled, “What’s in a Name?”  Each month we’d run an article about the backstory of a local landmark’s name.

Reading my reviews of my recent Haunting Danielle release, The Ghost and the Twins, I noticed a number of comments regarding the boy’s name—since it was not mentioned in the book.

Before I go on—if you choose to leave a comment, don’t mention who the twins belong to, who they are, or what boy remained nameless. That’s for those Haunting Danielle readers who have not read all the books in the series.

Anyway…this got me to thinking about that long ago column, What’s in a name?  Because a number of readers seem to be reading more into the missing name that was actually there. My readers gave me far more credit than I deserve—speculating there was some clever reason I ended the book without a name reveal.

But alas, I must give the truth…I simply could not decide on a name. The girl’s name was easy, I named her after my granddaughter, and her middle name, well, that was obvious. After reading the book and learning why I failed to name the boy, a friend suggested I name him after my grandson. I had to remind her, Haunting Danielle already has an Evan!

I obviously must have the name by my next book, but I need your help.  Leave your name suggestion in the comments!

Age and Time

I believe our perception of age and time changes with each passing year we live on this earth. My first awareness of this came one Christmas when I was a small child. Back then, it seemed that Christmas night was in some way the saddest time of the year, because it meant Christmas morning was a year away. At that age a year seemed like forever. 

I said something to my grandmother about how I wished we could make the year go by quickly so it could be Christmas morning again, to which she admonished me, telling me to never wish time away because it goes much quicker than I realized.  Boy, was she right. Of course, I didn’t understand that then.

In my teens, I assumed my parents—and most people of their age, were relatively clueless about the world we lived in. This was in the late sixties and early seventies. My parents were in their late thirties and early forties during that time.

At eighteen I had lived a lifetime—at least my lifetime at that moment in history. Looking ahead, it meant it would take another eighteen years to reach the age of thirty-six and considering how long it had taken me to reach eighteen, and how long those four years of high school were, I had so much time. Time was something I could take for granted. 

When I was in my mid-twenties my father’s upcoming fiftieth birthday terrified me, because I worried it would be his last. My maternal grandfather and my mother’s youngest brother had both died around their fiftieth birthday and I was convinced that when a man reached that aged—especially one who smoked—his end was near.

(While Dad did live another thirteen years, I realize now he died too young, but considering his smoking, poor food choices, over working, and under exercising, it wasn’t surprising, yet another topic altogether.)

In my thirties was the first time I truly felt like an adult, who people took seriously—despite being both a mother and wife since my twenties. But then in my forties, I felt something I had never felt before. Old. It’s not that I felt physically old. I simply felt I had passed over some divide between youth and old age. My time was running out, and that time was moving much faster than it had when I was younger.

When I looked back on my life, I realized my first twenty years of life had gone relatively slower than my last twenty—with each new year moving faster and faster. 

But then in my fifties, my husband and I took an unexpected houseboat trip. At the time we were real estate agents for a brokerage in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. One of the agents in our office—someone whom we didn’t know that well at the time—invited my husband and me to join him and his wife (another real estate agent at our office) for their annual Lake Powel houseboat trip.  They went every summer with a group of friends, and they had room for one more couple.

My husband, who had always wanted to go on a houseboat trip said yes without asking me. When he told me, I thought he had gone nuts. Go on vacation with a bunch of strangers?

But we ended up going, and it proved to be one of our best vacations.

So how does this have anything to do with my perception of age or the passage of time? During the first houseboat trip, I learned that three of the four couples with us were much older than my husband and myself. In fact, some were either nearing their 70th birthday or were already in their 70s.

But these weren’t old people. They were fun, adventurous, and intelligent. They liked to waterski, ride wave runners, and knew how to captain a houseboat. It was a wonderful trip, and the next year, we joined them for another houseboat trip. Unfortunately, the one who had originally invited us on the trip had been battling melanoma for some time and the disease had finally caught up with him. So the third summer we had a mock house boat trip and stayed in Havasu for our sick friend.

And so, I went from thinking I was old in my forties, to looking back on that time and laughing at my youthful foolishness.  The cliché is spot on—age is just a number.

In less than two weeks I turn sixty-nine. I’m still younger than some of those dear friends were on those houseboat trips. At least three of them have since passed—but that’s part of life, something that no longer scares me as it did when I was forty.

And that first houseboat trip—it was over 18 years ago. But if feels like it was maybe ten years ago at most.