Christmas in the mountain magic is in my mind right now.

I’m sitting in an easy chair in front of a fireplace with a nine-foot, fully decorated Christmas tree and nine colorful Christmas stockings hung on the mantel with care. It’s in the family room of my sister’s home on Signal Mountain. It isn’t likely to snow, but the place, the town above and the city below (Chattanooga) has successfully captured the Christmas feeling for me. It is chilly, not cold, and a mist seems to hang on the mountain this time of year.

My Southwest corner native wife seems to think so also. We’ve been coming here for Christmas since 1992, with only a few years of the holidays being in Lebanon when my mother was too ill to ride up the mountain. It is our younger daughter’s total image of Christmas. She was three when we started this run.

As i sit here, i think of all of the Christmases the Jewell’s, Orr’s, Hall’s, Prichards, and Roe’s had together. Martha and Todd have captured that sense of Christmas here. Old fashioned, family oriented Christmases.

It is beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.