Is it just me, or is time flying? I mean warp speed!

When we’re young, we think we’ve got all the time in the world to do everything we want to do. When we’re in our 30s and 40s, we wish we could squeeze a few more hours into each day to get everything that needs doing done. Then, after 50, we find ourselves hanging on for dear life just to keep up with life.

I think it must already be Christmas. Town folks are planning their parades and tree lighting ceremonies, and everybody’s talking about upcoming holiday events. I wish my budget was as festive. I’m not griping about rushing the holidays, though. I totally understand. Especially in these stressful times, people need the Christmas gatherings and family times that bring us closer, that cheer us up. I love this time of year. I just don’t want Thanksgiving and Christmas to go by too quickly. I want the season to last as long as possible.

So, have you done your Christmas shopping yet? Just kidding – although I’m quite sure some of you finished it months ago. I’m not crazy about the commercialism of Christmas, but I love searching for just the right gifts for my friends and family. I look at it as a challenge. Sometimes, however, I end up nearly tearing my hair out trying to figure out what to get some of them.

One year, I thought I’d found the perfect gift for a friend who loves fly-fishing – a wicker basket to hold his catch. It looked like it came out of a Currier & Ives painting of a fly-fisherman of old. I thought it was so neat and couldn’t wait to present it to my buddy. Turns out, my buddy is a very practical person who, when I gave him the gift, told me he put the fish he caught directly into the pocket of his waders. Sigh. I returned the basket and got him a gift card instead. If he wanted smelly, slimy fish in his pants, that was fine with me.

I love giving people gifts I’ve made, and I’m seriously considering doing that this year. My friends may be getting framed photos I’ve taken or they may get jars of kosher dill pickles I put up this summer. I don’t sew, knit or paint, so my options are limited. My pickles, unlike Aunt Bee’s on “The Andy Griffith Show,” are at least edible, my friends will be happy to know.

Once I made a Christmas present for my Cousin Anne, God rest her soul. I collected tiny sea shells from the beach on Tybee Island, Ga. and glued them onto a piece of board I sanded and shellacked. Then, using alphabet soup noodles to form the words, I glued an original poem I wrote for Cousin Anne onto the plaque. She loved it, and it felt good to give her something straight from my heart.

Many years ago when I worked at the newspaper in Allendale, I helped put together a Victorian doll house for a friend of mine’s twin girls for Christmas. We worked on it at the newspaper office over a period of two or three weeks, and it evolved into a community project. Many people who stopped by the newspaper to bring in articles or ads ended up working on the doll house – sometimes for just a few minutes, sometimes for a couple of hours. We were all so proud of that doll house!

Well, if I’m going to open my own Santa’s workshop, I suppose it’s time to get busy.

T&D Region Editor Carol B. Barker can be reached by e-mail at cbarker@timesanddemocrat.com or by phone at 803-533-5525.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 7:27 pm and was written by Carol Barker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.