Lillian Lake fall dining room attire: freshly baked autumn apple pie and candlelight. Lillian Lake photo

I’m so excited. We’ve begun decorating for Christmas. The outdoor lights won’t be turned on until after America’s Thanksgiving. I don’t think so, anyway. I love the Christmas season, and you can’t begin too early. When remembering the commercial aspects, it may seem too early to bring them out, but that’s when I say, “Observe, not absorb.” Just because the stores have tinsel town displays and sell all kinds of trinkets and toys “just in time for the holidays” doesn’t mean we have to let that turn us into Scrooge. I’m not decorating early. Actually, I’m late. After all, Thanksgiving in Canada was in October. So we can chew on that little inconvenient truth as we chew on our pie.

I not only love Christmas decorating, but I also love sappy Christmas movies. The ones that make us cry into our cocoa and get us all choked up emotionally which is far better than choking on fruit cake. By the way, I love fruitcake but not the mass-produced stuff you find in the grocery store. Bill Lambert, a surgeon who lived in this area of Maine passed away years ago, but he would order a fruit cake from Texas [I think] and bring it to the Med-Surg floor of the hospital. It was the bomb diggity of fruit cakes. I lived the whole year looking forward to a bite of that cake. My mother made a fruit cake every October. She’d wrap it in brandy-soaked cheesecloth and put it up in the cupboard to age until Christmas. Not a crumb of that cake went to waste.

For now, I have only accomplished getting the mantle decorated. I look forward to that artsy task more than decorating the Christmas tree. Every year, I strive to do something different and magical. One year, during the season of the virus that shall not be named our son was here for Christmas. He looked at the mantle and said, “You didn’t really try this year, did you, Mom?” True enough, my heart wasn’t into it and was lacking a creative spark.

My harvest decor still reigns in the dining room. Its days are numbered [the decor, not the room] but in the meantime I continue to light the table candles and enjoy the warm glow of these waning autumn evenings. The soft glow in a room of browns, oranges, and yellows comforts our home as though wrapped in a soft cotton quilt.

So, you see I don’t rush one season into abandonment in favor of another. The seasons meld and flow one into the other. I’m reminded not to hold on to what must be let go, but don’t rush to leave. Seasonal changes teach us to embrace transformation and transition. There are no rules. Whether you’re an early tinsel town tracker or a late-blooming golden glitterer, you’re right on time. I believe that whatever the timing we choose extra light and love are always in style and always on time and make the world much happier.