The Tree

I am completely excited about Christmas. In fact, I don't think I've been this excited about Christmas since I was a kid. I think the difference is that Abby is excited. She has anticipated Christmas, and been thrilled with all its trappings in the past, but this year I know she really, really gets it.

I have such grand plans to keep the momentum going, and for squeezing the most out of the season for all of us - some of which you will hear about in the coming weeks, but today we started with the tree, and that seemed to be all that we could handle.

I had fabulous plans about our tree trimming adventure. We would have Christmas music happily playing in the background, while we put the tree together and actually hung the bulbs this year (having gotten a promise from Abby that she wouldn't touch them). It would be a fun time for all of us as we decided the perfect spot for each of the precious ornaments. There would be lots of laughs and talk about the coming holiday. The plan was to do quite a bit of decorating, while I snapped wonderful pictures of our darling helping to make the house festive. We'd put up the nativity and review the real reason for Christmas, and we would even pull out our "Dicken's Village" which hasn't seen the light of day in several years. Today would kick everything off. That was the plan. That's not how it happened.

It started when we left church. Abby and I had nursery duty and since Abby was the only "customer" we left a little early. I thought by talking about putting the tree up she'd be super excited about getting home - she wasn't. I had to drag her to the car, hoping that no one was around to see me pulling her behind me while she yelled, "No! No!" I finally got her in the car, but by this time she was in tears - at least they were tears of regret, instead of angry tears.

We had another little "bout" of poor listening on the ride home, so by the time we got there we were both in a nasty mood. Thinking we could still salvage out "festive" day, we hauled the tree up from the basement and started putting it together. By the time we'd gotten it all out and were ready to put it together though Abby was crying in ernest. She didn't quite understand that we were setting things up, she didn't want us to "ruin" the tree. She didn't like it when we reached through the branches, looking for plugs and adjusting limbs, and she really threw a fit when we had to wrestle the extension cord away from her with the on/off switch for the lights, she wanted to turn in on, but didn't understand that we had to plug it in first. Here we were: Abby bawling, me telling her to stop crying, and Jason with his head in the tree trying to figure out why some of the lights weren't working....but hey, we did have Christmas music playing, at least there was that.

Finally I decided to scrap it, and let Jason work on the tree while Abby and I went up to her room for some quite time. She continued to cry as I carried her upstairs and I vowed that tonight it would be early to bed. After a little bit she was feeling better and wanted to go see the tree. She was happy to see the lights and played for quite a while in front of it, but I decided that we'd save more decorating for another day....or maybe for when she was sleeping.

After the "storm" she was in a much better mood. I love this picture. It makes
me happy on so many levels.