Christmas Tree Time

It's that time of year again. The Christmas season has officially begun for our family. Last weekend we put up our decorations. I have so many hodge podge items but it still seems to come together pretty nicely. My husband got excited when he found our stockings from when we first got married. "Look honey, these are our original stockings!" He was impressed, he acted like they were an ancient relic. I purchased them from the dollar store 10 years ago. That's the only place we could afford to buy Christmas decorations 10 years ago. Haha. I guess it is impressive that they've held up so long and stayed with us after so many moves. 

We took the kids to the Christmas parade yesterday afternoon. It was such a nice day yesterday. We sat on the curb next to a palm tree under this beautiful 200 year old building. It was so warm. People were in tank tops and flip flops. I love living here. We watched the bands and the belly dancers and the corvette club. We were towards the end of the parade and the kids did not get one piece of candy. They were very disappointed about it. As if they don't get enough junk. The oddest thing that I noticed this year that I hadn't noticed in the years past were that people were sitting on dining room and kitchen chairs. They literally took their dining room chairs out of the house and carried them around downtown to come watch the parade. Am I the only one that finds that a little bizarre and extreme? It was somewhat disturbing to me. Whatever. 

Afterwards, we had dinner with my sister and then went to pick out a Christmas tree. In years past, we cut down our own tree but it was very expensive to do that and the tree farms are 45 minutes from our house and last time they didn't strap our tree down good enough and our tree flew off our car into oncoming traffic (twice) and my husband had to retrieve it and we had to ghetto-rig it to get it to stay on top of the car for the 45 minute trip. It was horrible. We were traumatized. So now we just go to a tree lot. 

We went to this tree lot by the house. I had my dad with us, which proved to be entertaining. We get out of the car and there is a man cutting branches off of a tree. My dad says to him, "You gonna make a wreath out of that?" The man looks up at him and he obviously did not understand what he said. So my father says again, "You gonna make a wreath out of that?" The man just looks at him blankly. I'm like, "Dad, I don't think he speaks English. I don't think he understands." So my dad says it again except this time he does this circular hand motion in the shape of a wreath. *Face palm* Pardones, mi padre es un gabacho. So we look around and all the trees are freaking expensive. We found this big fat tree and it was only $55. I thought it seemed suspicious. We looked around the tree and it seemed legit. We got it strapped to the roof and off we went. Thank goodness my dad was around because him and my husband were big men and put it up, it was pretty painless. Then I noticed that it was a little bare toward the bottom. I didn't care that much, we turned it against the window. I won't even decorate the side that faces the window because we have a huge bush that blocks the view of our living window. That side of the tree could be destroyed and I would be whatever about it. We strung the lights. I usually will string a popcorn and cranberry garland but my husband put the kibosh on that because apparently he hates popcorn garland and he was very vocal about it this year. We will decorate it sometime this week. Our trees are always kind of funny. They are pretty, slightly imperfect, a little lopsided, hodge-podge, but put together with love. They pretty much embody what my family is all about. haha. So, Christmas time is here again. Let the chaos begin!