20 Things on My Winter Bucket List

Dear Ones,

Happy December!  Hope wherever you are reading this, you’re curled up warm and comfy. Thank you for being here.

On this shiny new month, the last one of this year, I am sharing “20 Things on My Winter Bucket List”.  These are daydreams for activities I hope to enjoy over the months of December, January and February.  I fared pretty well on my autumn bucket list, will share my final tally in an upcoming post.  Let’s see how I do this go-round.

I submit to you, my winter bucket list.

• Attend Trans-Siberian Orchestra and Elf – Will help get my Scrooge in the mood, I hope.

• Bake cookies – Would like to wait to do this with my babies but they will be here such a short time together, that I don’t want to spend that precious time in the kitchen.  Need to get the cookies baked ahead of time.
• Barnes and Noble for cocoa and writing – My Prince and I have always had aspirations of being authors.  At least once every winter, we take our laptops to B&N and write on our stories over a cup of hot chocolate.
• Basketball game at the University of Texas, El Paso (UTEP) – Have never been to one but would like to go show my support to the team and the school.
• Build snowman and play in the snow – At least some of this may be out of my hands, but sure going to try.  Just need the weather to cooperate.
• Cocoa-jammies to see lights – Did this last year with Brennyn and Cady after reading about it on Mix and Match Mama.  I say it/write it wrong every time, so I guess we are making it our own version of Shay’s “Jammy Cocoa Christmas”.
• Decorate inside and out – Including my wheelbarrow.
• Family picture – Even if Purrsimmony or Purrsnickitty has to take it.  We haven’t done one in years.  High time.
• Hike – Maybe in some snow?  With our backpacks, and a packed lunch.
• Hot tub soak and fire in the fire pit – So perfect with my Prince in the chilly winter air, under starlight.
• January winter door décor – I already have an idea, just need to make it happen.
• Make ornaments and place mats with family – Everything is purchased, just praying we have time to do some of these little memory-making activities.
• Mix-up some delicious Mexican hot chocolate – Nothing like it.
• Pay it forward – In the line at McDonald’s or somewhere out and about.
• Pick name from tree or find child to adopt for Christmas – We are so blessed and have so much.  Hope to help someone less fortunate.
• Record a Christmas story – I want to record it for my girls and theirs.
• Ruidoso – At least one quick trip up to the mountains to clear our heads and our minds.
• Run a winter 5K
• Scrapbook Christmas – Maybe not all of the pictures from all of the years that I am behind, but at least work toward catching-up.
• Skype with Yeny, catch-up with Jenny – My surrogate “daughters” from other mothers.

Was talking to my mama this morning about one of my favorite winter memories she used to share with us as kids.  When she was a little girl, Mom lived in a house that was heated only by a great big black stove in the front room.  Every winter night, a few hours before bed, my mom would take some old Bolivar, Missouri clay bricks and stick them on a metal rack inside the stove.  As she dressed for bed, she would put the heated bricks under the covers of her bed, right at the place where her bottom would be laying in the next few minutes.

The heat from the bricks would radiate up the mattress and down until mama’s bed was toasty warm as she slipped under the comforter.  A comforter, she reminded me today, made of 3″ x 5″ squares of wool (itchy?) swatches of fabric for the suits sold in the store where my granddaddy worked.  The patches were sewn together, back-stitched in red yarn and backed with a dark piece of flannel or wool.  Then my grandmama would stuff the quilt with feathers.  Mom would move the bricks to the foot of the bed as she scrunched beneath her comforter.  They kept her warm until she was too sound asleep to realize she was cold.

My daughters and I always pretended to put bricks or hot potatoes (a la Laura on Little House in the Big Woods/on the Prairie) at the feet of their little beds on winter nights.  Then we would slip between the covers together to read a book before they drifted off to sleep.  Was never cold enough in El Paso for real hot potatoes or warmed bricks, but we sure liked to pretend.

One last memory.  Was watching Dolly Parton’s “Christmas of Many Colors” tonight while writing this.  At the end, all the family “got” for Christmas was a Whitman’s Sampler of chocolate.  Every year, my mom would buy my dad a Whitman’s Sampler.

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Each evening after dinner, my father would ceremoniously invite us to select a chocolate for dessert.  Until they were all gone.  Precious memory.  Add that to my winter bucket list, so make that “21 Things on My Winter Bucket List”.

Hugs and kisses,