Christmas Windows

When I was a little girl mom used to give me white shoe polish and let me paint our windows for Christmas.  My brothers and sisters and I painted snowmen and snowflakes all over our windows, and thought they looked so beautiful.  As I grew older I tried different ways to add color to the windows.  Believe me, food coloring does not work, but acrylic paint was lovely, although it was awfully hard to get off.

In 1975, the Bicentennial, I found a calendar with the most adorable pictures for each month.   Mom was a sweetheart and let me paint a new scene on our front room window every month that year.   It was so much fun. 

It's not easy painting on windows.  I had to paint the pictures on the inside of the window so the paint wouldn't wear off when it rained, but that meant everything looked backwards from the outside.  It took a lot of practice, but I got better and better during that year.
Three years later, when Sheldon and dad started the print shop, I realized I could finally do something I had always dreamed of.  I could paint Christmas Windows on a real business!  I couldn't wait for Christmas that  year, and painted our windows the day after Thanksgiving.  It was a good think I did it early, since Holly was born a couple of weeks later.  I was really pleased with the way they looked, and we had lots of people in our strip mall comment on the windows.
The next year Sheldon talked to some of those businesses, and I got to paint their windows as well.  It was the first time I actually got paid for painting, and I figured I had finally made it as a commercial artist.  Mind you, I was expecting again that year, and I must have looked pretty funny standing in front of those stores,  big and pregnant,  my paint spattered apron barely covering my big, pregnant belly, but I had so much fun.
From then on, painting Christmas Windows became an annual project for me, and the best way I knew to pay for Christmas.  Some years I bundled up in coats and gloves and froze as cold wind blew around me.  Other years I wore shorts and a T-shirt, wiping sweat out of my eyes as the sun glared off the windows.  Always people stopped to watch and talk, and usually I had a car full of kids waiting for me to get done.  It was a far cry from the shoe polish windows of my childhood, but I still felt the same thrill of accomplishment as I stepped back from a finished window to see the bright reds and greens, accented with white snowflakes, and my signature in the corner.