May you have a Happy Noel and a Merry New Year!
I wish happy holidays with the above line partly as an inside joke and partly to honour my late irish husband Noel. He was always out if sorts at Christmas especially larger family gatherings. I never quite understood it until we went back to Dublin one year to visit his family that included the Christmas holidays......long story short after a more than enough tipple mixed with bitterness, resentment and more than a few tears I adopted the saying " At least you're not having an irish Christmas!"
Fast forward from then but back to December of 2005 Noel and I had recently moved into a house and finances were tight so we had agreed that buying a tree that year was better spent elsewhere until my husband shows up Christmas eve already well into the Christmas cheer boldly claiming "I've got me a tree!" Protesting that we couldn't afford it he assured me he had only paid $19.99 for it and dragged in a cardboard box barely 3 feet long.....
Well wasn't I pleasantly surprised to pull out of the box three compacted pieces of an extremely realistic looking 6 1/2 ft mountain pine tree that once screwed together and complete with a string of lights that also came in the box we only had to decorate and Noel topped it with a christmas angel he fashioned with a tiny dolls head and torso and a plastic purple wisteria and we decorated with a mix of old decorations and a variety of airplane mini liquor bottles we had squirreled away from our last overseas trip.
That tree kicked off the best Christmas holidays Noel ever had.....by luck or circumstance he recieved almost every gift he had ever had on his wishlist to Santa including a brand new pair of brilliant white adidas trainers ( pronounced Ah-deedas the european way) from one of his best friends and soon to become our roommate Dan (and later my partner.) A fly fishing rod and reel to go with the complete fly fish tying kit he couldnt stop talking about....the usual new christmas sweater (jumper), levi 501's, socks and underwear and one last gift i found and bought on a whim....a slot car track and two new (1/20 or 1/16) scale slot cars. That was the piece de resistance.....a gift he had been promised by his da as a kid but never recieved!
Noel spent the rest of the holidays having slot car races with the track he built under the tree by a crackling fire (we had a real fireplace remember them?!!) He tied a fly or two a day when he had no race partners. He practised his 10 and 2 fly fishing technique with the end of his rod, fly line and a soon to be shredded left over xmas bow once both he and Liart our cat discovered "catfishing" was their new favourite game to pass the time.
Best Christmas ever! Sadly that was Noel's last Christmas as he passed a little more than six months later as did his "show" cat Liart six weeks after Noel (they were meant to be together forever.) I ended up getting a great partner out of it too ....by the following Christmas it was Dan and I celebrating together with Max ( @maximum_gato ) who came into our lives only because Liart left us when he did........needless to say its about time screw together the "Noel tree" for its 16th season (one for every year we were married!) and still standing strong if not a little crooked as it first did back in 2005. Great memories indeed......Happy Noel Everybody and a Merry New Year 2021!!
