Bah humbug! Just kidding, though truthfully, I'm not a huge fan of Christmas decorating. Oh yes, Christmas decorations are beautiful, and I enjoy them when they're out, but it's the putting them up and taking then down that gets me.
My poor tree. We do fake, which is a necessity with my allergic asthmatic kids. After much prodding from the little people in my house, I finally drug it down from the attic last weekend. Before I took it down I had it in my mind that this was going to be the year that we replaced all our old lights with new LED ones. Well, when I opened the box I discovered I had left last years lights on the tree. No biggie, I was gonna roll with it. LED lights could always wait until next year. I assembled the tree, plugged in the lights, then felt that a few strands were warm. Dang it! Off with the old lights and on to the store for new lights I went.
I usually load my trees with lights, but after seeing the price of the new LED lights, I decided to be conservative. Little did I know that the strands of LED lights were about half the length of our old strands of lights. I ended up with lights for barely half my tree. *sigh* There was no tree decorating that night.
The next day I sent Matt to the store for more lights. Sold out. My poor half lit tree had to wait. The next morning I tried again - still out. By now it is Monday afternoon, we've been looking at a half lit tree for two days, and my kids are going crazy wanting to decorate the tree (well, Alex mostly). Between dropping one girl off at dance and picking the other up, we made another dash to the store in search of lights. They were STILL out of LED lights, but at this point I didn't care, so I bought regular ones. Hallelujah, the tree is lit!
Alex wanted to start decorating right that instant, but by the time we got Lily home from dance and Matt got home from coaching his game, it was too late. Tree trimming was delayed. I made promises to the little ones that Tuesday would be the day. We had no plans, we'd light a fire, drink hot coco and have a merry time decorating the tree.
Um, "merry" isn't exactly the word I'd use to describe our evening. My goodness, those kids of mine wear me out! There were broken ornaments, a bossy big sister, an overly excited brother, and a little sister who couldn't manage to get ornaments on the tree. Lucky for me, they lost interest about 20 minutes into it, as soon as A Charlie Brown Christmas came on TV.
I *thought* I was going to do a more sophisticated tree this year, something with a theme, with less of the yearly Christmas ornament collection and more pretty ornaments, but once we started opening the boxes I had to go with sentimentality. I love that my tree is filled with ornaments that both Matt & I made as kids, our kids have made, ornaments passed down from my grandmother, and ornaments we've purchased & received for special occasions. All those ornaments are like old friends, a reflection of the life we've led.
Now that the tree is up, the house feels more cozy. My bah humbug thoughts are disappearing. I think I even feel like doing more holiday decorating - imagine that!
*yes, the pom-pom garland made an appearance once again!
