It's a Blue, Blue Christmas

Hi everyone. It's Melodee here. Sam had the "great" idea of having all of us share a Chritmas memory and I volunteered to be the guniea pig...so, off on my "Journey" we go!

When I was a child, we had two Christmas trees. For the one we kept downstairs, we made popcorn strings and paper stars. We hung funky glass balls and those C7 multi-colored lights. The whole family gathered to decorate it. It was the kid tree.

Upstairs in the “front” room, that one room where children can’t touch anything, where it is always quiet and a little dusty, my parents set up the other Christmas tree. The room had this amazingly soft light blue carpet. At times, not Christmas, I used to steal away to this room. My sister and I could draw pictures in the carpet because though it was old, people rarely walked on it; the pictures would last for days.

This room has an amazing picture window in the center of the largest wall and the north west corner with a window on each side. In that corner window, the perfect tree would rest throughout December. It was white aluminum. Perhaps it was imitating a frosted tree. The white of the tree mimicked the white walls. I grew up in the 70s, so we had that velvet wallpaper in many rooms of the house. In this room, the wallpaper was white with white velvet.

They only used blue glass balls on the tree. I think I once got to hang a couple, but the placement was too precise for my haphazard ways. My dad usually moved the ones I put up, to make it more even. I think he only noticed on the day they set up the tree because, of course, my sister and I would sneak into the room and rearrange the balls, the precious nativity, and anything else that would move without breaking.

The tree was too beautiful for the ordinary C7 lights; they had not invented the delicate white lights yet, so my parents used a floodlight to set off this tree. The light cast a blue hue on the corner, and the tree had a mechanism to rotate round.

We lived at the top of one side of a gully. I remember driving home after dark many nights back then. Going down one side of that gully, I would look toward the house, waiting. The car made its way to the top of the other side, and suddenly I could see the blue glow from that corner window. The spinning balls only increased the glitter. Somehow that blue glow always held a different meaning of Christmas for me. We opened the child-wrapped, home-made presents downstairs. Christmas upstairs was always quiet and lovely, perfect.

As I was looking at the Journey Collection, this flood of memories of my childhood "Perfect Christmas Room" came rushing back. It was then that I decided on the 'Perfect' present for my Mother. I created this album with some of her old photos. I hope when she opens it, she will also remember that Perfect Blue Christmas Room. The perfect white tree, the perfectly placed blue glass balls, and that flood light. Merry Christmas, Mom.