by Anne Harrell

Created on: November 12, 2008

Memories of Christmas season of 1987 come to mind every year as I begin to get ready for Christmas. My severely handicap daughter loved Christmas and the lights on the Christmas trees. It was a week before Christmas when I was getting my Christmas baking done when Cyndy was crawling back and forth from the living room into the kitchen while I was making the cookies wanting one cookie after another. Some time had passed since the last time she had come wanting another cookie and I begin to wonder where Cyndy had gotten. With her being, so quite I thought at first that Cyndy probably had crawled up on the sofa and gone to sleep with the quietness of the apartment with the Christmas music playing softly in the background.

The lights on the tree had been on most of the day with the day being cold and damp. Cyndy loved the lights on the tree. She would go up to the tree, grab a light, and watch it winkle in her hand, then gently setting it back on the tree. Apparently this day Cyndy felt that the lights were being covered by the Christmas balls that she couldn't see the lights as she had in the past days or either it was that Cyndy wanted the tree to be much brighter.

As I rounded the corner of the kitchen, looking into the living room Cyndy was taking the Christmas balls off the tree. One by one, she would take the ornaments off the tree, turning the ornament all angles, inspecting the engravings on the ornaments then placing them neatly on the sofa then grab another one and start her ritual over again. Once she had gotten all the Christmas decorations off the tree as far up as she could reach, she stood back and looked at the miniature lights twinkling, as she started clapping her hands and cooing loudly. Cyndy thought she had done us a big favor.

It was then that I realized that Cyndy wanted more lights on the tree and wanted to see the tree glow more in the dark. As quickly as I could I finished the baking the cookies, and grabbed up Cyndy and my baby son Richard, heading off to Roses to pick up more lights to place on the tree. As I placed the lights on the tree with four strings of clear lights and four strings of multicolor lights. We had a couple strings of each set to twinkling, and then the other ones remained stationary. When nighttime would come, the tree glowed so much that we could sit and read by the Christmas tree lights.

Every year after that we have added extra lights on the tree because of Cyndy's love for Christmas and in memory of her. When

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