The Wreaths

    We'd come home from school to find the wreaths hanging in  the windows, and we knew Christmas was coming. On our child's time line though, still a long way off.  For if Ma had decorated the windows on the first day of December, Christmas was still an eternity away.
   My mother must have been thrilled to be in a house of her own at Christmas, after all those dismal rental houses, five of them I think.  Somehow, in those days of little or no money for anything but necessities, she had acquired wreaths, four of them by my count. They were kept in a cardboard box in one of the unused rooms upstairs and, having been squashed in storage, always took a little time to fluff out into their correct shape.  They were meant for inside, being of what seemed like rolled paper of some sort.  Of course they were round, and they were red.  She hung one in each of the 2 front-room windows, one in the middle room window, which faced the old mill, and one in the kitchen window looking out on the cinder block building.  I don't remember another wreath for the other kitchen window, but there could have been one.