A Basketful of Christmas

Every year UPS delivers a delightful hand filled basket of goodies to our house. It is the gift my brother ships us from just west of Chicago land. The first year the basket arrived we thought it would be best to save it until Christmas morning; didn’t seem right to open it earlier. We had no idea what was inside. When we did open it, we found it packed with beautiful fruit, some of which had not endured the time sitting under our tree close to the heat vent. We learned from that experience to always open the present as soon as Mr Brown dropped it at our door.

The baskets are always beautiful and the goodies are always unique. Sometimes it will have a theme of breakfast goodies and come stuffed with interesting pancake mixes, syrups, sausages and jellies. Whatever the theme, whatever the goodies inside, we always feel like Santa just dropped a whole bag of cheer right into our living room via UPS.

This year with all the fuss over the big storm aggressively heading our way we rather lost sight of anything much, except checking to see if the storm had hit yet. The mailman had come and night had fallen and we decided we weren’t going to do anything so we curled up in our jammies and comforters and watched videos. The next morning I rushed to the door to have a peek and see how much fluffy white goodness had come to bless us. From the window it didn’t look too bad.

My first surprise came when I opened the door (the inner door swings in, the storm door swings out) and found I had to really push to get the storm door open. That meant there was more than 4” of snow on my front porch. I stared at the white stuff when I finally realized that snow wasn’t the only thing that had dropped out of the sky. In the early dawn I could see a large box now nearly covered with snow. I couldn’t guess when it was parked there. This was going to be fun. It would take a broom, hopefully not a shovel, to get that box inside. I figured I’d better get dressed since I was definitely going to need boots and I was soon brushing the powdery fluff off the porch. I dragged the box inside with a loud, “wheh!" full well knowing, any fruit inside that box is surely frozen by now, since record lows had been predicted for the night.

We waited until the sun came up, breakfast had been cooked and eaten and decided it was time to open our box. The theme this year seemed to be goodies of the best kinds. Yummy cookies, candy with caramel, nuts, peppermint, a package of pancake mix, a package of cookies which my daughter tore into and said “hey, this tastes just like key lime pie”. She was right, they did. A special card from my brother was the last thing we opened and read the Christmas greetings. Then we both exclaimed over the basket itself. It was woven of dark woods and interwoven into the warp and woof was a vine of holly berries and leaves. It is one of the most beautiful baskets I have ever seen. It will deserve a special place here at home to be appreciated by everyone, all year round.

One thing for sure, when the basket arrives it is always a fun time of expectancy and laughter. For sure, nothing says lovin like a basket from my brother. It just sings jingle bells in my heart and keeps me smiling all day.