Oh Hot Pink Christmas Tree!

Ah Yule Tide.  Gotta love it.  Two weekends ago the lights went up, this weekend it was the tree.  We almost didn't put one up.  We've never really done a Christmas tree with the kids, being Christmas Scrooges as we are, and foreseeing that kids + tree would = disaster.  This year we decided to throw caution to the wind and go for it!  I am so glad we did.  So far there have been no fires, no broken branches and Jude hasn't tried to pee on the tree yet (thanks to Dan, he knows how real men take care of business when they don't want to interrupt outdoor play time with going to the bathroom in the house.)

Back to Yule Tide Joy.  The kids had so much fun decorating the tree!  The whole ordeal was actually much easier than I imagined it would be (and I was TIRED the day we tackled it!).  I unwrapped some of my old ornaments from when I was a kid for the first time and found myself getting teary-eyed.  A combination of nostalgia and spending Thanksgiving without extended family (sniff, sniff).  The kids loved hanging ornaments.  We did have one causality -- one of my favorite ornaments, too, but thankfully it was a newer ornament and not one from my childhood.  I guess that's to be expected when the kids decorate the tree!

I love how you can see the sunny Texas day though the window. 

 

Don't my arms look super long in this next picture?  Long like you'd see in one of those kooky circus mirrors that make your limbs look twice as long as they really are.  I guess I'm kinda gawky.  My middle school health teacher used to call me "turkey neck".  Seriously.

Jude has a little shepherd boy ornament from his great-grandmother and he thought it was very special.  He asked that I hang it toward the top of the tree so Indi wouldn't get it and shatter it.  Awwww!

We wanted to do colored lights, but I bought 200 and as it turns out that's not nearly enough (it sounded like a lot at Lowe's!).  So we have a red (read: hot pink) and white tree.  We've started a new tradition where each night before we put the kids to bed, we sit around the tree and sing a Christmas carol and then Dan or I tell a Christmas story from when we were kids.  Or at least this was the initial plan.  Jude, who's normally into stories, isn't so interested in sharing in our reminiscing of Christmases past and instead would like to hear about something more exciting... like airplanes!  We are also going to read an Advent devotion each night, but I'm waiting for my Advent devotional to arrive from Amazon.