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Mary lived in a small Midwestern town with her family which consisted of her husband, George,   Mary and three children; Al, 12, Sophie, 8 and little Beth, 2.   Her husband was employed at one of the local factories and she stayed home with the children, content to be that "keeper at home" and grateful that her husband’s job supplied them with enough income so she did not need to go outside the home to work.   Mary read her Bible daily, participated in some church ministries and really believed God was leading in her family’s life.

During July, she began shopping for the Christmas holidays at one of the local "Christmas in July" sales.   She started a stack of gifts for their own family and for extended relatives in the attic, and began to anticipate the Christmas holidays with excitement.

Just the next month in August, when the Halloween decorations began appearing in the stores, Mary picked up some Harvest decorations and thought to herself, "My goodness, it just seems like these holidays come faster and sooner each year".   The scarecrow and pumpkins she purchased were right next to the "Back to School" layaway special, so while she was there, she picked up some school clothes for Al and Sophie, put them in layaway and on second thought, grabbed a snowsuit for Beth and put that in layaway too.

During September, after the two older children were safely in school during the day, Mary began choosing recipes for the Christmas cookies she wanted to bake to mail to relatives in other states.   Then, she helped plan the Holiday bazaar for the church and the Christmas Festival at the grade school. With many projects on her plate, Mary chose to eliminate choir and teaching Sunday School from her busy schedule.   After all, she had stuck it out during the birth of little Beth and now she felt she deserved a "break". 

Almost daily, it seemed like one of the neighborhood children knocked on her door with a box of Christmas baubles to sell as a fundraiser, or with a sign-up sheet to order cookie dough or pecan crunch.   Mary ordered and bought what she could to help them out and turned back to her own kitchen, with cookies underway to be frozen until the time came to mail them.

October arrived with the usual hustle and bustle of fall leaves and costume preparation.   The products and goodies Mary had purchased from the neighbor children also arrived, and those were put away in the attic for the children’s stockings or placed in the freezer to mail later.   Midway through October, Mary went to the fabric store and purchased the material and other things necessary for all three children’s costumes, pulled out her sewing machine, placed it on the kitchen table beside the holiday baking and feverishly began cranking out a little angel costume for Beth, a Raggedy Ann costume for Sophie and a pirate one for Al........even though she thought he was getting a little too old for all this.

Almost as an afterthought, Mary realized it had been several days since she had read her Bible, following the daily Bible reading schedule she had found online.   Oh, well, she would "catch up" later, after all, the holidays only came once a year.

The first day of November, the day right after Halloween, Mary was in the store and saw the new Jell-O molds for Thanksgiving in the shape of a pumpkin and decided they would look nice on her Harvest table, so she purchased them, hoping to remember to put the directions WITH the mold, so she could remember how to make it look the same way as on the front of the box.   She also picked up the whole walnuts, pecans and chestnuts for Christmas and some of the wrapping paper that was on sale.

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