"Daddy, when can we put this tree upstairs?" Little asked.
"Well..." I started to answer, and then realized that I didn't know. I didn't know what the date was. We like to put our decorations up a little early in our household. We generally pick the weekend that falls the closest to November 15th, but when was that going to be? Probably next week, I guessed. I pulled out my phone and checked the date. I was surprised to discover that today was the 14th, and tomorrow, Sunday, was the 15th. I suppose you can't get a weekend any closer to the 15th than the 15th.
"Well," I said again, "We can probably do it as soon as we can get the basement cleaned up enough to quit."
A few minutes later, we were taking the tree up the basement stairs, and installing it in the corner of my study.
In an attempt to make things easier on ourselves last year, we didn't even take the lights or the ornaments off the kids' tree before we took it down to the basement. So, all the kids had to do was plug the tree in, and rearrange the ornaments so that they looked nice.
In a snap, it was ready to go.
So, what is the kids' tree? We have a family tradition of going to the store every year, and allowing the kids to pick on ornament each to be their own special ornament. We mark it with their name and the year, and someday, when they move out and start their own family, they'll be allowed to take those ornaments with them to their own home. For a while, my wife would let the kids put those ornaments on our main Christmas tree. Eventually, she got herself a set of matching, themed ornaments for our main tree, and the kids' ornaments needed a new home. So, we got a second, smaller Christmas tree for putting the ornaments our kids pick each year. My wife does allow the kids to put the present year's ornaments on the main tree, but the rest have to go to the other one.
So, the kids tree was part one of our Christmas decorating for this year. Part two, we did that evening. That's when we went to the store, and picked our ornaments for this Christmas.
What did they pick this year? One picked this glittering, blue and red representation of the planet Saturn:
Apparently, she has plans to paint it. Not sure if that will work, since it's already covered with a coat of gloss, but we'll see. Maybe, once she's done it, I'll do a post about how it turned out.
Another picked this pair of mukluks:
We realized, once we got them home, that she has some kind of a thing for shoes. In previous years, she's bought ballet slippers and ice skates for her ornaments. Now she has a third for her collection.
Lastly, there was Little. We kept finding things that we thought he'd like, and he'd look at them with no enthusiasm whatsoever.
"That's nice," he'd say.
"Do you want it?" we'd ask.
"No," he'd answer uninterestedly.
We started to wonder if he even understood what was going on. It was time to go home, and we'd looked at every ornament they had. Nothing had clicked with him. We were considering going to a second store, to give him another chance to pick one, but we didn't really want to. We wanted to be done.
As we went to put back all the ornaments that we'd put in our cart as possible keepers, Little suddenly spied something he liked.
"There it is," he said, "I've been looking for this all night."
It was a rocket ship that had been set aside as a possibility for my older son. Apparently, Little had never seen that one. Proportional to his disinterest in all the other ornaments, he was in love with this one:
Now everyone had what they'd come for...except for me. I grabbed a bag of mint M&M's.
Now everyone had what they'd come for. We headed home, with plans to put up the rest of the decorations the next day.
When we went to put the lights on the tree, we found that we didn't have very many lights. Not enough to cover the tree to the top. I tried to spread the strings we did have as sparingly as I could without leaving it looking bare, but it still left the top bereft of lights. So, we made the kids only put the ornaments on the areas below, and planned to get another string of lights tomorrow.
The tree looks a little funny, but it won't for long.
The last bit of holiday fun we had planned was the jug of eggnog we'd bought while grocery shopping the night before. We poured each of the kids a cup, and bid them enjoy.
Eggnog is one of my favorite holiday treats, but it's pretty expensive, and also astoundingly fattening. So, it's not something we can indulge in too much. This may well be our only eggnog of the year.
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