Christmas Tree 2011

Hi! Isn't this a great shot? Doug took it from the car! I love this time of the year! The Hancock and Sears are all lit up with green and red! But I must ask, where did November go? I was going to write this last night and of course the evening turned into more online shopping :) But, I noticed only 4 posts last month! Sorry!! I just kept thinking that we had more time to do things and then BOOM it's December and we have a Christmas tree in our house!

We were going to get the tree last weekend but it was so nasty and raining so we decided to wait until this weekend and it was .... nasty and raining :) But, the skies did clear just enough for us to get a tree and we were treated to temps in the 50s so that was terrific. This week it's in the 30s and Friday is supposed to be in the 20s. Winter is coming. Soon.

Anyway, we had so much fun picking out the tree and went to the same place we go every year. We told James that there would be Reindeer there and he got really excited! We told him that the reindeer pull Santa's sleigh and he looked at us with huge eyes and just nodded. So precious.

We walked around a little bit and James saw a cart that was decorated and said, "Apple Cart!" He thought it was the cart from "10 Apples Up On Top" and so a photo had to be taken :)

James held on to our ticket for the tree - what a great guy!

James also loved having the tree on top of the car. We'd say, "Where's the tree?" and then open the sunroof cover and say "Oh! There it is!" - it sounds nerdy but it was actually pretty funny ... suppose you had to be there :) After we got home it was late, we ate dinner and then James went to sleep. That night, Doug sawed the end of the tree off and we put the tree in the stand. On Sunday, James woke up and saw the tree and got so excited. He put his rings on it that we made. I tried to encourage James to make a red, green and white chain but he preferred his blue and orange. He was so excited to put them on the tree. 

Doug and I were singing parts Christmas songs laughing and realized that James had no idea what we were talking about - he never really has heard Christmas songs so we popped Doug's phone on the Bose and turned on Pandora's Christmas channel. We were all in the Christmas mood by the end of the day. It was so cute to see James dancing around to the music and to hear him singing, "Santa coming town!" and "Holly Jolly Christmas" all day. I'm not usually the Christmas music type person at all but there was something very moving and special about 'seeing/hearing/thinking' about these songs through a first-timer's perspective. Hearing Frosty the Snowman and the Grinch just brought such vivid images to my mind. I love this time of year :)

Anyway, the house is in decorating mode and we were able to put up most of the decorations yesterday. We got these cute ones from the Land of Nod.

Hopefully we'll have the rest of the house finished and the tree decorated this week. Just waiting for those wonderful smelling branches to fall :) I love the smell of a Christmas tree! Hope you all are having a wonderful start to December!