One boy home, another to come in five days! The cat is thrilled and the house echoes with loud playlists . . . well, I exaggerate, because currently the boy and the cat are fast asleep together. But in a few hours, they'll be up and loud again.

In the meantime, I will fight my head cold and try to raise myself from the malaise of yesterday's poets' reception, which was crowded and full of people I didn't know. Thus, through no fault of its own, it instantly triggered all of my deer-in-headlights-must-run-now social anxieties and I skedaddled before our governor-elect, Janet Mills, unexpectedly arrived to speak on the importance of poetry and women's words. Imagine: a governor of Maine who loves poetry, and who attends this sort of reception because she thinks that poets are important constituents! This is not what we've been used to in Maine for the past eight years, to say the least.

But I'll get over my malaise, if not my head cold. Today is go-buy-a-tree day . . . the first Christmas tree we've purchased in decades. It will be full and pretty and well balanced and not at all what we're used to. Paul suggested we cut out every other branch and chop the top off, just to make it feel more like our scatty Harmony trees. For some reason, they always looked perfect in the woods. Then, as soon as we got them into the house, they revealed their pitiful scrawniness, weak-branched and pathetically sagging. Not that we didn't love them, but only because no one else could.

I think I'll also make eggnog today, from the recipe I honed a few years ago. Here's a link to it, in case you are decorating your own scatty or elegant tree today.