The password is "tinsel"

The Christmas word for the week is "tinsel." It's like a Yule calendar. This week, I find a way to work the word "tinsel" into spoken conversation every day.

Yesterday we assembled the Christmas tree. It's not much of an adventure since we have recreated the same tree for the past six years, give or take a light strand.

I'm not sure why we put up a tree, except that it would seem sad and bleak not to. We're not especially fond of the activity of either putting it up or taking it down.

But that part in the middle is nice when the lights come on at night or when we get up in the morning and the world is brown and wintry and there's a big green tree facsimile in the house, with symbols of our memories hanging on it.

For instance:

N. gave me this Snoopy at the typewriter the year I started working on my book.

And this green glass bulb hung on my great-grandmother's tree, in the house that my great-grandfather built for her.

And the beaten-metal kitty was given us by friends the year our cat, Rocky, died after a long, loving, nursing-out time.

Our friends felt anxious that they had possibly given us a painful reminder.

It didn't work that way. Rocky the Cat and pain are not allowed in the same room. We put the kitty on the tree. It makes us smile.