{"id":23958,"date":"2017-12-12T12:08:09","date_gmt":"2017-12-12T17:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=23958"},"modified":"2017-12-12T12:13:29","modified_gmt":"2017-12-12T17:13:29","slug":"moms-tree-topper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=23958","title":{"rendered":"Mom&#8217;s tree topper"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/c1.staticflickr.com\/5\/4596\/38123123175_7eff112242.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>In the fuzzy foreground you can see one of my Mother&#8217;s paper mache, Christmas, tree toppers. Just after my college years she started making very popular Christmas tree ornaments for the little boutique, <a href=\"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=13788\">Harpies Bazaar<\/a>, she was a part owner of in Mankato.  My parents are in a picture on the wall behind the little Christmas scene I just put up in my attic office. Its a little artificial tree full of and surrounded by my Mother&#8217;s ornaments, the ones that don&#8217;t fit downstairs. Some of my earliest memories of Mom were of her teaching my fourth grade classmates how to make paper mache puppets. The teacher&#8217;s husband even made a small puppet theater and I remember getting laughs from my classmates by adlibbing for the puppets while I was behind its curtain.<\/p>\n<p>I bought the faux tree when Mom was in dementia care and decorated it each year until her death. She died just before Christmas 2015 and I got to her room in time to begin singing a family Christmas favorite,&#8221;Good King Wenceslas.&#8221; She breathed her last breath before the first stanza was finished.<\/p>\n<p>Sorry, gotta go. I have a funeral to attend. Its for one of the fellows at my church who always loved to give razz about my snow sculptures before they were completed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the fuzzy foreground you can see one of my Mother&#8217;s paper mache, Christmas, tree toppers. Just after my college years she started making&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-diary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23958"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23961,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23958\/revisions\/23961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}