Anyway, we made the collective decision to have Christmas for the kids while we were here. They could have mailed their Christmas presents or sent them back with us for them to open on Christmas day. After all the first Christmas, Gary and I were married they did that. However, they want to enjoy the looks on their faces as they get to open presents. We had Thanksgiving-Christmas with Mother's side of the family last night. Ruth plans to tell all about that on Wednesday so I won't steal her thunder. Tomorrow night we plan to have our little family Christmas here with Mother and Daddy and my three brothers, and I thought we NEEDED to have the tree up to be in the spirit of things. You knew I would make it back around to the whole point of putting up the tree early.

I love the look of a Christmas tree, if I could figure out how to do it I would use those bright, happy, little, white lights all over my house all year long. With all the lights in the house out, and the just the tree lights on it's so peaceful. I love the process of putting the things on the tree. Some people have themed trees, and I'm not knocking that, because they look really, really cool (even though I can't seem to pull them off), but my family has the best eclectic totally random tree of all times. There are ornaments I made in Kindergarten, my brother's Angel of Death, there are the engraved ornaments that Mother got for each of us when we were first born, one that says our first Christmas together 1983 for my parents, there is one that is a basket ball when Nicholas played b'ball, one neat candy cane that Benji made and no one has ever found the stuff to make more, there are the ugly Santas, and all of Daddy's many, many, many Loony Tunes and Disney ornaments. I've mentioned a few of these in older post here and here.

Each of those old ornaments have memories associated with them, but we also get new ones each year. From now on when I see the cow that Daddy picked out this year I will have memories of Britt kissing it over and over all night and straining and saying Moooooooo at the top of his lungs. The way he begged and begged to hang "so more balls pwease, Momma?" After hanging the 3 dozen or so that Mother all ready and and the 3 dozen more she got at Hobby Lobby this year. The way Ruth kept going back to the new MM's ornaments. Or perhaps my new favorite memory from this year will be the way that Britt and Ruth after hanging their two Sesame Street ornaments, brought me all the little Sesame Street toys and asked for hooks for them to add them to the tree. They still needed a little help here and there as Britt but nearly 10 of the orange balls all together, and 8 of the 10 candy canes (which he insists by the way are candy bars) all together, but it was a great time of togetherness.