It's the most wonderful time of the year!

Every year, as Thanksgiving dinner settles and everyones focus moves to Christmas, I find myself secretly dreading many things about "the season". Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Christmas as much as a kid.... but now that I'm adult, I have many of the less fun responsibilites... like cleaning up after decorating, stressing over how I'm going to get that perfect, hard-to-find gift, and dealing with stupid people in mall or store parking lots!!! But I digress, we started our decorating frenzy last weekend. I am a believer in artificial LIGHTED Christmas trees--easy peasy and looks nice, too. Marc, however, is not. I choose to pick my battles, and this is one that I really don't think I could win. The unfair part, though, is that even though I'd prefer the other route-- I get stuck putting the lights on the tree. I understand why, if anyone else did it, I would not be happy. And if mom's not happy.... I'm picky, I like my lights wound in and out of the branches to add depth-- with as much cord hidden as possible. Nope, no wrapping the tree with lights like a rolled up rug-- big pet peeve! So off we went to cut down our tree at a local tree farm. We got there, browsed the varieties of trees, and decided that we needed the Fraiser Fir. Go figure, this is the one tree that was hauled in from North Carolina around Thanksgiving already cut. I thought about it for a split second, looked at the mud and thick fog in the air, and told the men to head to the barn where the pre-cut trees were. I think they were secretly relieved. It had rained that morning and after looking at my once white van as we got out, I was already dreading the "search for the perfect tree". Once in the barn, there were dozens of trees lined up all around. We easily decided on the height we needed which narrowed the selection down. One of the workers held one up, I looked at it for about 5 seconds and said, "I like it, sold, wrap it up". He looked at Marc in amazement and said, "That never happens". We look around to see families that looked as if they'd been in the barn for half an hour-- one lady was holding a glass of wine-- she knew it would take a while! Needless to say, I got overruled by Hannah-- she liked an equally nice tree right next to the one I picked. So we took an extra minute, and got the second tree we saw. The lady with the glass of wine, pounced on our reject :) It was a fun trip... every family needs a little tradition, right?