Getting with the program
My wife Judy and I spent a decade of laziness. Let me explain. For 10 years, we lived in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas, a marvelous retirement community in the Ouachita Mountains just southwest of Little Rock. That was the longest we had lived in any place since our marriage just shy of 50 years ago. With our Air Force and Lockheed Martin Aerospace moves (around two dozen), we spent many holidays in different cities from Hawaii to Germany — all treated a little differently. We have just experienced an amazing difference recently.
Our life in Arkansas was much different from the standpoint of holidays. Other than our time in Germany, we had always lived in a city, full of all ages of folks, from small kids to elderly men and women. Hot Springs Village, as I mentioned, is a “retirement” community. Although there were some children in the Village, the vast majority of the 13,000 people (or so, since some had a second home there and only visited part of the year) who lived in the 500-square-mile community nestled in the 26,000 acres of wooded hills were 60 or older.
What that translates to is a different approach to some of the popular holidays, specifically the ones near the end of the year requiring decorations. Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas took on a much different look in the Village than in a younger community. For the most part, much of the look was the same year round — dull.
I don’t recall one child coming to our door to “trick or treat” in the 10 years we lived in the Village. Not one. And I might have put out a couple of pumpkins on the porch for Thanksgiving (we had real turkeys running around the community, by the way.) Christmas? We traveled a number of years — back to the Fort Worth area to see our son Brian or to some other destination. The years we stayed in the Village, decorating the house was very minimal. I think one or two years I actually hung tinsel lights from the gutters on the roof, wrapped a red ribbon around the mailbox and hung a wreath on the door. Sometimes we put up a tree and sometimes we did not. Ho, ho, hum.
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