Christmas Traditions Part 3

Hello again!  It has been ages since I have had the chance to post anything.  Christmas time is so busy--especially when so much time is taken up by the Christmas curse (more on that later) and remaining time is taken up by other Christmasy stuff.  At the beginning of the month I always feel so on top of things, but by the time the 25th approaches, I feel overwhelmed by all the things I wanted to do and didn't get done.  It is one of my Christmas dilemmas.  Always.   I do have some ideas on how to solve this dilemma, though.  More on that later, too.  

In the meantime, as a testament to how truly far behind I am, I am going to post a bunch of blogs on Christmas 08.  I am a year behind!  Because even though this post is labeled Dec, I am actually publishing it on Jan 4th.  I downloaded the pics weeks ago with the intent of doing a little writing and then getting the posts up, but you know what they say about the best laid plans.  That seems to be the story of my life these days.

So enjoy a little bit of Christmas past and soon I'll be sharing my ideas for Christmas future. 

Christmas Traditions Part 3: Decorating the tree

We always decorate our tree after eating dinner, and for the past couple of years, dinner has been pizza.  I buy pre-made dough and each person rolls out their own pizza and puts on their toppings of choice.  For the boys that means sauce and cheese.  Mostly cheese.  They are so imaginative.  James actually likes to use as little sauce as possible.

William loves to use the "roller" to roll his dough.  

Aaron and his boys

With Johnny Mathis playing in the background and the sweet scent of pine tree filling the house, we begin to hanging ornaments on the tree.  This year, James remembered ornaments from years past, and was especially thrilled with all the ornaments that had his name on them.  William was especially thrilled to hang anything on the tree and seemed to have a real knack for finding every single one of my highly breakable, vintage, non-replaceable ornaments.  Decorating the tree with with him was a little exhausting.

 

Lilly was content to sit and enjoy the spectacle.  She was quite taken with the lights.  

William shows off one of his ornaments.  This time a non-breakable one.

Decorating the tree is serious business, can't you tell?

This year I added some cute, silver garland to our tree.  I found it at IKEA for 99 cents, and I love how vintagy it looks. James kept calling it the "silver garlic".

Every year I let the kids pick out a new ornament for the tree. That means there are a lot of train ornaments on our tree. I also hang all the ones they make.  That means my tree doesn't look like a magazine tree, but it is full of very special memories.  Like this ornament that James is hanging here: a Peter Pan ornament from his second Halloween when he was Peter Pan.  While we were decorating the tree, everyone was happy and laughing and everything felt very merry.  I looked at our 3 beautiful children, and I said to Aaron, "sometimes do you think to yourself, "I can't believe this is my life, but in a good way?"  

  

About 30 minutes after I said that, James threw up all over the kitchen floor.  Aaron looked at me and said, "do you ever think, "I can't believe this is my life, but in a bad way?"

There are all kinds of Christmas memories to be made, and someday, we'll look back on this and think it is funny, right?  Merry Christmas!