Christmas Nostalgia

My grandmother had the patience of Job.  In addition to making porcelain dolls, all of their clothes and accessories, and ceramic figurines, she also created Christmas ornaments.  This was a year round activity and her attention to detail was incredible.  When I married I received a box of these beauties in the mail.

 This hobby gave her an unnatural attraction to bead stores.  My sister recalls indulging her with a trip to one, and it was quite painful to wait while Grandma spent hours (no joke) choosing the best beads to purchase that day.

Although, they are fraying and showing a bit of tarnish they are still beautiful to me.  And when we finished decorating the house this year I was feeling nostalgic and missing my Grandma.  After a long day of unpacking Christmas boxes, rearranging furniture, fighting cheap strings of lights, and vacuuming the floor free of all needle debris, I settled down on the couch with a cup of coffee to enjoy the Christmas scene. 

My first thought was, "Wow!  With the fire blazing this looks like a Norman Rockwell image, or one of these houses in the village I set up under the tree."

When I glanced at the children sitting in the room with me I knew that we'd never make the Rockwell-image cut.

My oldest daughter had her face buried in her laptop and my son was nodding his head to the beat of the music streaming from his ipod.  This got me to wondering.

A few days later on a trip to Savannah, I decided that the older image of the holidays, free of advanced technology, wasn't lost completely.

Wouldn't this scene fit in nicely under the tree with the rest of my Christmas village?