Christmas Magic

I have always loved Christmas and can't wait to pass down certain traditions to our children, but one of the things I'm not so good about is decorating. Oh, I LOVE Christmas decorations, but I'm very much a "put it up at Thanksgiving, take it down at New Year's" kind of girl. Since David and I have been married, we always go visit family for Thanksgiving and Christmas (with the exception of the year we were awaiting Matthew's arrival). We sometimes start Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving, but most years the bulk of our buying is after Thanksgiving. So many years I would be out of town for work and then we only had weekends...we had to choose to either shop or decorate, so we shopped. The years I spent more time at home we decorated too. We actually have 3 trees of various sizes that have different "themes" and go in different rooms. We also had garland, velvet bows, & icicle lights for the outside of our old house - here we don't have a lot of room for the garland, but maybe someday we'll do the outside!

This year we were out of town for a while at Thanksgiving and will be gone for 2 weeks at Christmas so we waffled about putting up a tree. Finally we decided to put up JUST a tree so we got started Monday night (I decided what the heck - we'll leave it up later in January!). David & I waited until Matthew & Scarlett were in bed and brought the tree up from the basement. We got the branches and lights on, then decided to wait until last night to add the ornaments. Yesterday morning when Matthew woke up & I brought him downstairs, he pointed at the tree and asked "what's that?" - I told him it was a Christmas tree and that was that. He didn't pay it much attention. Last night after we ate supper, David showed him the switch to turn the lights on & asked him if he wanted to turn them on. He climbed under the tree and flipped the switch. I tell you, the expression on his face made it worth it! He lit up more than the tree did! It was great. He sat watching if for quite a while, then we got out the ornaments and he helped us with a few of those before he had to get ready for bed.

This morning the first thing he did when I brought him downstairs was crawl under the tree to turn the lights on. We are planning to finish the ornaments tonight & hopefully I'll get some pictures up later this week.