Christmas Day 2025

Me in my Previous Life 1964 - Bucks County, PA
(BTW, I still have that bathrobe!!!!)

 Good morning folks!

Are you sitting on the floor, lotus fashion, around your Christmas tree in your jammies waiting to begin opening Christmas presents?

I hope so!

Christmas is a family thing. 

Bill always said that. He also always said "Christmas is for kids." I believe that but I also believe Christmas is whatever you make it for yourselves.

Of course the REAL MEANING of Christmas is to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, the founder and leader of the ONLY REAL RELIGION (according to their adherents, especially the evangelicals) that will get you in Heaven. That is if you give enough praise to their vengeful and insecure God who will smite you if you DON'T ACCEPT this mythical person called Jesus Christ as you SAVIOR. 

I never understood that whole concept folks, even when I was a little kid and being brainwashed into this concept that never made sense to me. Of course I understand now, that form of religion was to keep the Great Unwashed under the control of The Few who seized power over them by threats and intimidation and promises of Eternal Damnation unless you followed their dictates.  

So here I am on Christmas Day, which originally was a pagan holiday heralding the beginning of a new beginning. 

I'm not all "Bah Humbug" though about the concept of Christmas. I'm a believer in you doing whatever gives you comfort, as long as what you do doesn't interfere in my life choices. Who am I to tell you what religion to follow in your life. But by the same token, this is a message for you Evangelicals, don't tell me what I HAVE TO DO to conform to the religion YOU choose so I get get my ticket to Heaven.

My beliefs are very simple. I think we all have a spirit or soul that inhabits this body of flesh and bone that, if we're lucky, lasts about seventy or eighty years. We are incarnated in these physical bodies to LEARN and LOVE while we're LIVING. We keep coming back to this physical life until we get it right and then are blended back into The One. Yes, THAT God. 

So on this Christmas Day I wish all of you a happy and joyous time with your family, if you have one to spend the day with. For those of you who have no family with you today, I wish you a very happy day with your memories. That's the way I'm spending my day today, with my lifetime of memories made possible by my late husband Bill Kelly and my many friends I've made during my lifetime including those who have passed and my few friends left who are still alive and will probably outlive me in this physical incarnation. 

Have a wonderful day everyone!

Ron's Many Homes

 

2124 Spruce Street, Philadelphia PA. My apartment was on the top floor to the left. I had to walk up four flights of stairs to get to my apartment. I doubt I could even walk those stairs now. I can hardly walk up my stairs here at Casa Tipton-Kelly.

Now for the Christmas countdown! 

Yesterday I completed ordering my annual personalized desk calendars for 2025. I send one of those desk calendars to my close friends. These are my Christmas gifts. That and a personalized Christmas card. I have the cards ready and this year I have the dreaded Christmas Letter that I'm sending out. I usually don't send out Christas letters but this year I want to inform my friends that I'm flying solo this year. I'm informing them that Bill is gone. 

I'm not sure if I'm going to put up a Christmas tree this year. I only put up a colorful Christmas tree last year for Bill. Bill, with his macular degeneration, was legally blind but he could see colors and the colorful lights of the small aluminum tree I put up in his line of sight gave him comfort and pleasure. I was going to put up that tree again this year but it would just be another reminder to me that Bill is gone for the rest of my life. Ron is flying solo again, for the first time since I was twenty-one years old. 

All my life except for that brief year and a half period from when I got out of the Army in January 1963 to March 1965, I have always lived with other people.

Me standing in from of my small furnished efficiency apartment at 388 Madison Street, Coatesville, PA where I lived from April 1963 to February 1965. My apartment was on the bottom floor to the left of where I'm standing. Bill took this picture of me many years later. This apartment is where I came out to my Mother when she caught me with my married boyfriend one Saturday morning and I told him to hide in the bathroom. Regular followers of my blog know THAT horror story. So much drama. 

From the Grand Central Station of my Tipton Family Life before I joined the Army at eighteen years old to those three years in the Army with I lived with hundreds of other guys, I've never lived alone.

Me, many years later, sitting on the stoop at 120 Washington Avenue, Downingtown, PA where I grew up. Our family and an apartment on the second floor of this building. It was grand central station. This is where I developed my obsession to one day have my own back yard. Funny, how these steps now seem so small but when I was a kid with my brothers (below) back in the Fifties, they seemed so much bigger.

Me and my two younger brothers and some other neighborhood brats back in the Fifties when we were the Terrors of the Neighborhood

A fairly recent picture of 120 Washington Avenue, Downingtown, PA. We have the second floor front apartment. My aunt and uncle and their kids lived on the top floor and another aunt and uncle lived in the second floor rear apartment. Lots of Tipton's in that building. As I said it was Grand Central Station. I never had friends over. I was too ashamed. That apartment building was in the white trash section of Downingtown. Still is to this day. I'll always remember the rent. $22.50 a month for that cock roach infested apartment. 

I always yearned to live alone but when I did, I didn't like it, not at all. I thought I would but I didn't. Oh, there was one other time I lived alone that I actually did like it. It was a brief eleven month period in 1980 from January to November. Our house was being built in Pennsylvania but not completed so I had to rent a fourth apartment in center city Philadelphia at 2124 Spruce Street for $150 a month. I actually liked that. Bill with our two Pomeranian dogs lived in the unfinished house in Pennsylvania until construction was completed. I think the difference this time was that I knew it was only temporary that I would be living alone. 

Oh, there was one other time I lived by myself. A furnished one room efficiency apartment in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The grand Victorian house in Shadyside, Pittsburgh where I resided for about three months in 1960 before I moved back to my hometown because I was just too lonely in Pittsburgh. 

I had an eight dollar a week apartment where I had to share a bathroom with four other apartments! I hated that. My room was on the right, first floor. The bathroom was on the second floor and invariable someone was always in the bathroom when I wanted to use it. If I did happen to get the bathroom to myself, then someone usually was knocking on the door asking "How long are you going to be?" Folks, that's one time you don't want to be rushed. I hated it.

I'm experiencing the loneliness of living alone again but this time I'm getting used to it. Probably the big difference is that I know I won't have years and years stretched before me living alone. At the rate I'm going now (falling asleep at 8:30 at night), I won't have all that many years left. Back when I was twenty-one, I wasn't too happy about sixty or seventy years ahead of me with the prospect of living alone.

Notice how I start out with the Christmas subject of this blog posing and I veer off to living alone? That's the way I compose my blog postings folks. Whatever train of thought winds its way through my overloaded brain. 

Another apartment my family lived in. The rent here was $0.0. We lived on the second floor (that my Mother on the porch with her canary in the cage getting some fresh air). The deal here was that our family was given free rent to live above the offices of Gindy Manufacturing Company (my father worked for David Ginsburg who was a trailer manufacturer). Our family were the de facto "watchmen" for the manufacturing company building which was right next to this red brick building. My mother was about to save enough money for our family to rise out of abject poverty and finally have our own, albeit very small (1100 square feet house) with three and a half acres of land. The year was 1958 and I finally had my own "backyard!" Only got to live in that house for a year though until I joined the Army and I was back in "apartment" (barracks) building. 

This is an aerial view from the Sixties. My one remaining brother lives there now (the one I don't talk to, he's lost to the MAGA cult). He has spent thousands of dollars to remove ALL the shrubbery because he's too lazy to trim and keep it up. The property used to be beautiful now it looks like a Martian landscape). 

1075 Hopewell Road, Downingtown, PA 
my bedroom (finally had my own bedroom!) was the middle awning room

Will Pat and ever live together? I doubt it. We're way too set in our ways, both of us. Oh yes, we'll still get married but we'll have a long distance relationship. And that is fine with both of us so anyone reading this blog thinks I'm up to having someone else move in here at Casa Tipton-Kelly, you can have another think coming. It ain't happening. I've already severed my relationship with one longtime acquaintance who was making the moves. It ain't happening. That person was already trying to run my life. It ain't happening. No more reporting where I go, when I'm coming back and all that freedom that one has to give up when sharing living arrangements with someone else. I didn't mind with Bill because we loved each other. I'll have have that love or love somebody that much again. Never.

Have a great day everyone!