Christmas Tree

I live for the Christmas season -- I'm totally in to it, love it, could be it's number one fan. I know what you're thinking, "Yeah yeah Veronica, everyone loves Christmas." But I'm serious. Sometimes during other parts of the year I may or may not get a little teary-eyed when Christmas is mentioned, just pining away for the time when I can once again put up decorations, get a tree, make peppermint cookies, sing Christmas songs and carols "ad nauseum" (as Nate likes to describe it), cook lots of food, get that warm fuzzy feeling when you remember what Christmas is all about, and best of all be with family for an extended period of time (thanks to school and work and other things that prevent this the rest of the year).

As a result of this, I'm always trying to extend the Christmas creep -- sometimes into October -- and it drives Nate crazy. This year I agreed, albeit reluctantly, to wait until after we got back from Thanksgiving break to bust out the Christmas music CDs, but this didn't stop me from singing songs out loud to no music the whole month of November...sometimes I even caught Nate joining in...I always knew he was a Christmas softy.

We just picked out our Christmas tree from Smith's (Nate insisted we wait until Dec. 1st) -- we pick one out still wrapped in twine so that we can stuff it in our tiny car and bring it back (half hanging out of the window, but no big deal) -- we like the surprise when we cut off the twine and it pops into its tree-ish form since we have no idea what it's going to look like pre-buying it. This one looks pretty good and we named him Severus (last year he was named Battlehardened -- don't ask me why, Nate took one look at it and announced it looked like a "Battlehardened", and this year it apparently looks like a "Severus" -- I guess our trees will always be doomed to have unusual names).

Nate has been a great sport as I've had him hang all the lights around the house because he's tall enough for the job. Nate's very systematic and while decorating the tree, he insists we step away from it time to time to see if it still looks good "from far away" and "from all angles" and he's always tweaking ornament and light placement so that it looks perfectly symmetrical. Needless to say, by the end of it all, it could pass as a Harrod's display tree (even if our ornaments are from Big Lots).

Christmas!!!