Well, the house is utterly trashed, the bathroom is probably a bio-hazard, but we got the Christmas tree and the Christmas Villiage up.

The Hub started to collect Department 56 Snow-Villiage figures the year we got married. It started with a church lit up for Christmas. It always seems like we come across figures that are meaningful to where we are in life and, by now, the villiage is like a microcosm of where we have been.

There's the Villiage Pizza shop, complete with delivery driver, to remind us of our dating days, when we hung out at the local pizza shop. See the little tow truck pulling into the Holly Brothers garage? The Hub said he had to have that because it reminded him of me....at the time I was working as a bill collector for GMAC....post repossession. Though I'm sure that the designers of this "perfect" 1950's themed villiage never thought of that! The Palm diner? That reminds us of the second year we were married when we took what we think of as our "real honeymoon" in Florida. ( The trip we took after we were married was just...well, it was a trip) His parents got him the Habitat for Humanity house in part because it is The Hub's favorite charity ( part of the proceeds went to Habitat) and partly because of his love of carpentry and a reminder of him helping his father build his fathers' cabin from the ground up.....

Likewise, the Coco-Cola plant, and especially the delivery drivers and truck remind him of his dear grandfather, who drove a Coke delivery truck in Romney WV, where the family had lived since time out of mind. There's even a little classic Mustang somewhere in traffic that reminds The Hub of his first car...the one he lavished all his care and attention on, lacking a girlfriend at that stage of his life.

You can't see them too well, but there are "The Holiday Movers" - we got them the December that The Hub's job transferred him to MA. The house with the manserd roof looks like so many of the homes in Gardner, MA where we used to live, and the little car pulling the old fashioned R.V. with the canoe on top reminds us of all the wonderful trips we took to Maine when we lived in New England.

We have a Chinese Restaurant. But we didn't put it up this year!!

But the best part of this year's villiage was putting up the piece that my brother and sister-in-law gave him last year. We didn't have room to put it up then, so this is the first year it is out, hooked up, and working. It's the "Home for The Holidays" Train and Station. The train, complete with a little track, lights up. A small group of people populate the train station, which has the realistic blue cast light. We put the Starbucks cart next to it, since there was always a Starbucks in the train stations on both ends when we traveled.

We used to travel back home by train for the holidays often. The weather was iffy, when I didn't have full use of my legs I often couldn't drive if The Hub got tired. The train, while expensive, was ultimately more economical to us, since it allowed us to spend more time with our families when we were here.

Every year, around this time, I'd get the same stomach clenching feeling, and we'd start the Holiday Travel discussion. Could The Hub get the time off? Could I? Could I switch with somebody? Could I afford to go with unpaid time? Could we get somebody to watch the dog? Once we missed the train completely because we got lost trying to take the greyhound to a new kennel.

But this year, opening up that box was as close to a train or a train station as we will have to get. Within walking distance of my folks house, and an hours drive from his, and much closer to our dear long time friends, we set it up, turned the switch, and listened to the "engine" play Perry Como singing "Home for the Holidays"

"Oh, there's no place like home for the holidays!
And no matter how far away you roam
If you want to be happy in a million ways
For the holidays you can't beat your home sweet home!"

Even though I didn't let The Hub see, I cryed a little bit when we set it up, and that's the truth.