Our First Tree

After Christmas last year I hit all the stores hard in search of great ornaments for our first Christmas. On that search I found everything except for a tree. Saturday we decided that we would be too tired on Thanksgiving to go find a tree so we decided we would get one that day. On our monthly Walmart run we found the perfect one. We were thinking more on the lines of how it will look in our new house then nessecarily how it's going to look in our living room this year. Obviously, from the pictures, it's a mammoth! And we love it! After barely fitting it and several weeks worth of groceries into the Jeep we headed home to the sound of Christmas music! (Shut your ears Holly) It was quite amusing, and we admit, we felt like the Chevy Chase Christmas vacation. But that's ok. Once we got everything organized and unloaded we started up the Christmas music again and started dinner. I made my first ever cheescake, and Chicken Cacciatore. We orginally wanted my alltime favorite, Partytime Chicken, but it took too long to cook. So we settled. I have to admit, John loved the Cheesecake. Even eating some tonight he commented to himeself that it was amazing. I was flattered of course!

Anyways, after dinner we hit the decorating hard. Little did we know, the enormouse tree was not only huge, but it came in all the little separate peices. The box said THREE EASY STEPS! They lied to us :-( But we laughed, got over it, and went on to putting the huge thing up anyways. Turns out that John is a master Christmas tree fluffer. So he fluffed and I followed behind with the lights. I wanted him to do the honor of topping the tree this year. Tiptoed and all it finally got up there. And yes, those are small antlers with a great bow tied around them. They are "reindeer antlers" And surprisingly enough, that was my idea. John was absolutly THRILLED that we did that. I think it's absolutly adorable myself!


A tradition in our home was that we weren't allowed to turn on the lights until after the entire tree was decorated. John didn't quite get this at first, but he soon understood just fine. We videoed the "lighting" of our tree. We were so excited. Sorry that it's pitch black and all you hear is my stupid screaming, but this was an actual emotional moment for us. I think it hit us right then that this really is OUR first Christmas as a family. And we thought the parents would like to see too! After the "lighting" we cleaned up all the crazy little pine needles and glitter and finished putting Christmas stuff up around the whole house. Including my great pink tree in our bedroom!

We are very excited about this week! Thanksgiving activities begin and it is the last full week of school for me! Which means work work work, which is also what John will be doing a lot of. Please pray that God gives us a lot of patience and strength this week. We will definatly need it!