Wishing You And Yours The Same Thing, Too

Going forward with the "transitions" theme - tonight we decorated the tree without all of us present. That's a first. Shannon's still at school, not scheduled to be home until this week.

But you gotta love technology. She was "with us":

We stayed on Skype throughout the decorating. It was better than being completely separated.

We realized late this afternoon that we had no lights. This was after I sent the boys up to the attic three times, refusing to believe that they "couldn't find the lights". Finally, I threatened to do them harm if I ended up going up up there and sniffing out the location of the lights within the first few minutes. Syd even offered to bet money on me. But we started to think a bit, and remembered getting out all of our lights for a party in July. In fact, we remembered that we didn't have enough lights and that we had to borrow some from the church. And then we recalled how we packed all the lights up...and we realized that we'd taken all of the lights back to the church in one big box. I guess it was part of our tithe.

The boys were right. They couldn't find the lights because WE GAVE THEM AWAY.

So I calmed down, and we called Tony to see what he had done with HIS lights from HIS tree last year. Sure enough, he gathered up a few strands and we got lights on the tree.

We pulled out our huge collection of glass ornaments, gifts, hand-crafted stars from countless pre-schools and we got that tree looking good. As we worked, we listened to Harry Connick's Christmas album - there can be no other for tree decorating.

We saved a few ornaments for Shannon to hang when she gets home. But it's done. The halls are decked and the fa-la-la's are ringing loud and clear.

Merry Christmas, y'all.