FISHTRAP HOLLOW, Miss. – If the house burns down, I have nobody to blame but myself.

A fancy peppermint candle is on the jam cabinet, painting an eerie shadow on Roosevelt’s unfinished portrait that hangs above.

Those fat, hot, colored Christmas tree bulbs that nobody favors anymore are strung on my cedar from the pasture, a weakened survivor of summer’s drought. Tannenbaum could torch at any moment.

The wood fire in the kitchen is, as always, seductive to my old dogs, who sometimes wander too close and afterward feel hot to the touch.

We are home for the holidays and all lit up like a Christmas tree.

Carla Bruni, wife of Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, is in CD rotation and singing a gorgeous rendition of “You Belong to Me” in her soft, French-y voice. I’m pretty content with my Christmas tableau.

Bring me the nog with its Lynchburg infusion.

I’ve seen the stylish holiday looks in the magazines that my friend and neighbor Barbara brings me when she’s done. In those books, people with white sofas and clean dogs decorate in sea blue or flamingo pink. I have tried, in the past, to have a Christmas color scheme, but sentiment always gets in the way.

In what one magazine calls “a pink holiday dream,” where would my flaking chalk Santa go? My father won it for me when I was 6 at a Florida fair by tossing nickels, an amazing accomplishment. I couldn’t live with myself if I had to hide the garish and jolly old elf in a closet. Couldn’t and wouldn’t.

The poster-board portrait my niece Chelsey drew of her family at Christmas would have to go in a closet, too, if I went for stylish perfection. Chelsey’s stick figures with finger-in-an-eye-socket hair delight me whenever I unroll the decades-old art and tack it to the wall.

I have snowmen made from plaster by artist Nina Bagley’s boys when they were small. I can’t imagine a Christmas without them on the table. I sure couldn’t hide my plastic Eiffel Tower snow dome with half of its water evaporated. It was one of the first French souvenirs I ever purchased.

Then there’s my mother’s homemade candle made from the paraffin she poured into Foremost milk cartons with a No. 2 pencil stretched across the top to hold the wick. The glitter is sparse and the whipped wax ornamentation has yellowed, but onto the table it goes.

A cartoon angel drawn by my former cartoonist husband has to be on the tree. When he drew that funny flying figure on balsa wood a million years ago, I had no hint that I’d ever be old, waxing sentimental about a long-ago Christmas when we didn’t have money for groceries – not to mention ornaments or lights – but went right out and bought a big and fantastic tree. Young couples can’t live on dried beans alone.

You’re allowed to be sentimental at Christmas. Some years, it hurts to wallow in sentiment more than others. Christmas isn’t for sissies.

But for right now, before the Big Elf arrives and the post-holiday blues kick in, I’m handling Christmas in the new old-fashioned way – with things I love, their colors and coordination be damned.

And among the things I’m most sentimental about: my readers. Thank you for your interest, your kindness and years of memorable Christmases.

Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s most recent book is “Hank Hung the Moon … And Warmed Our Cold, Cold Hearts.” Comments are welcomed at rhetagrimsley@aol.com.