A Partridge In A Pear Tree

“On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a partridge in a pear tree.”

Well, Thanksgiving and Black Friday are over and all I see now are Christmas Trees on almost every corner in the city.  Soon it will be Christmas 2009 and I am once again, as I am every year, astonished that it is arriving in less than a month!  When I was a kid Christmas took forever to get here.  My great aunts and my grandparents would send Christmas gifts pretty early because they had to be sent to St. Thomas and you never knew how long the mail would take to get there.  Those packages sat in the corner and vibrated.  Then they were put under the Christmas tree when that went up and they became ginormous and emitted heat waves.  By the time Christmas morning came I fell on top of the packages like a ravenous wolf…I had waited so long for that moment!   I miss those days of eternal yuletide yearning.