It's beginning to look a little like Christmas!

The house is decorated, the tree is up and decorated and presents are beginning to trickle in. It's starting to feel a little Christmasy. This year marked a first for us and is just another indication that the kids are growing up. Brenna put the lights on the tree.

Generally that's John's job. Our Christmas decorating follows a carefully crafted and after many years smooth process. You see, after 18 years of marriage and 20+ years together John and I have discovered that there are certian things we DON'T do TOGETHER! Under any circumstances... For instance we don't buy cars together. He surfs the web, test drives, hangs with the salesmen etc... He narrows the choices down to a couple and then I enter the picture. I view the choices and choose the one I like best. Done. Car purchased, no one cried, no one yelled and more importantly no one died! We actually followed the same procedure when we bought our house. He shopped, he toured, he smoozed... I looked at one or two and voila, house purchased. I just works better that way. Too many choices overwhelm me, too much changing of the mind frustrates me, I never want to hurt anyone's feelings including criminal salespeople. "What do you mean the tires don't come with the car? Are you sure? They are $5000 extra... Hmmm... Okay if you say so..."

We also don't hang pictures together. As you can imagine being a military family and moving quite often this almost proved to be our undoing not very long into the marriage. I approach picture hanging with a pencil, a ruler, a level and sometimes even a predrawn layout. John on the other hand approaches picture hanging with a hammer and his finger. "I think the picture should go somewhere about here" he says pointing with his finger. BAM... the nail goes in and the picture goes up. The first few moves not only did I almost hyperventilate and passout, but I almost took all my pictures and moved out!!! Now when it's time to hang pictures I generally leave the area if not the house and return when all the hammering is done. 90% of the time... it all works out fine.
So you can imagine in the early years the decorating of the tree proved to be quite challenging for this OCD girl and the caveman!

John always put the lights on. I left the room, generally going upstairs to read my book or out to finish Christmas shopping. Returning later to find the tree beautifully a light!
Then, the kids and I would pull out all the decorations and begin to decorate the tree. The kids always divide the ornaments into "their" piles, we talk about where the ornaments came from (they all have a story or a meaning behind them) and then find "just the right place" to hang

each and every one. John has generally left to watch some sort of sporting event, generally Ultimate Fighting Thing since that's such a Christmasy kind of sport. Occasionally he'll poke his head in the room to see how we're doing, but if you offer him an ornament to hang, he'll pale visibly, stammer "that's not my job" and immediately leave the room. So, this year Brenna did

the lights and she and Zack did most of the ornaments. I hung a few special ones, but really they managed quite well. Once again, no one cried, no one stomped off in a snit and no one screamed obscenities and drank an entire bottle of wine before anyone noticed. I'm just saying... it was a nice, peaceful holiday evening. I guess we're all growing up. :o)