It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

Last weekend when we were driving home from the airport we noticed that a lot of people already had their Christmas lights up.  So as we pulled into our neighborhood, instead of going straight to our house we drove around looking at the lights.  Amanda kept saying, "Christmas is here!" and I tried to explain that it was still several weeks away, but she could not be deterred.  How come Christmas wasn't at our house yet?  We assured her that we would be putting up all our decorations the following weekend.

This weekend we put up our outside lights, for the first time in several years, and our trees.  Yes, I said trees.  A couple of years ago I got the kids their own small four foot tree.  I did it because I was sick of all their school made ornaments junking up my tree (I am not sentimental that way) and because I got a fabulous deal and got a tree for under $20 a couple days before Christmas at Target.  Oh, I could go on and on about the many reasons I love Target.

We've tried live trees in the past and it was a total disaster, so by the time we reached Andy's first Christmas we had moved on to artificial trees.  A few years later we found out Charlie was allergic to cedar and I stopped feeling guilty about the fake trees.  I am so thankful for that allergy and it's ability to wash me of all fake tree guilt.

Anyway, we put up the kids tree and decorated it on Saturday, but the kids were a little done with decorating after that so we put up the main tree but didn't decorate it until today.  It went pretty well, except everybody was mad that they didn't get to put the star on the top of the tree (Charlie did it) and we broke two ornaments.  Even Amanda did an awesome job putting ornaments on the tree and there were only three or four placess that had more than three ornaments on one branch.  I may have said this in the past, but now I totally and completely understand why my Mom would rearrange all the ornaments after we decorated the tree when I was a kid.  It offended me at the time, but I get it now.  The one difference is that when I move the ornaments, it will be after the kids go to sleep instead of right in front of them right after they put them on.  Love you Mom!

So all of our decoration are up except a few outside lights.  It doesn't matter that we have tubs full, the kind that we really wanted to use we didn't have enough of so Charlie had to run out and get them today and then didn't have time to finish the outside.  We'll take care of that next weekend.  We started our advent calendars today (yes, a day late) and had the Christmas music blaring.  Now all we need is the snow.

Starting next weekend we'll take a little Christmas hiatus and start Hanukkah and then the mass-presents-in-the-month-of-December begins.  The kids are excited, we're not beaten down yet, it's all good.