After some coaxing, the Scrooge of our family softened her heart and allowed us to put up our Christmas tree. Her children were very happy.
I have two things to say in my defense:
1 - I didn't realize I was Scrooge-ish until my kids wanted to put up the tree on Thanksgiving weekend. I don't like having the tree up for a whole month. It's fun, but let's be honest, it's a hassle. My kids spent some time nearly everyday asking me if we could put up our tree. Then they started saying things like, "Mom, if you liked Christmas more, could we put up our tree?"
2 - Every year, Christmas is so over-hyped starting in mid-October that I have developed a deep dislike for Christmas until AFTER Thanksgiving. It makes me seem anti-Christmas, but I'm really anti-Christmas-before-Thanksgiving. I mean, what kind of grubby Americans are we? We can't take time to say Thank You before we're reaching for the gifts under the tree? Pathetic.
But it's December now. Our Nativity set (a Fontanini set that I cherish) has been out since Thanksgiving. We've started our annual Christmas story readings--a scripture and one uplifting, Reason for the Season story a day until the Nativity story on Christmas Eve. We visited a Nativity on Sunday--hundreds of beautiful Nativities on display (along with some really awful ones. What were some artists thinking?). For the first time ever I read Dickens' A Christmas Carol (and if you haven't read it, it's REALLY, REALLY good), and for the second time ever I read The Mansion by Henry Van Dyke (also amazingly good). I've started okaying the listening of Christmas music on the radio. And yesterday it snowed for the first time.
To me, Christmas is here.
So we put up the tree last night. It offered a good motivation to clean the house, since I told the kids that we couldn't put up the ornaments until all the rooms in the house were clean. I'm super mean like that, but they put in a good 2 hours of cleaning.
Sarah McLachlan's Wintersong set the perfect tone for the evening. I purchased 2 Mannheim Steamroller songs, and picked up Joy to the World sung by David Archelleta (free on the iTunes store, by the way). I'm going to have to go see which other Christmas songs are free AND worth owning.
Then we put ornaments on the tree and arranged all the knick-knacks. Teancom, especially, oohed and ahed over everything we took out of the boxes. He immediately claimed half of them as "his," and I thought he was going to pass out from excitement when I brought out the stuffed Santa Claus. It's an awful thing, so ugly, but now I'm glad I didn't throw it away. Most of these decorations we didn't put out last year (for simplicity's sake. Seriously, shouldn't this have tipped me off last year that I'm Scrooge-ish?), so Teancom was discovering many of these items essentially for the first time. Suddenly, everything we took out of the boxes seemed like a treasure to me.
To achieve this cheery Christmas result, the kids got to stay up late. After they were in bed, though, and everything was in its place and the room was vacuumed, I took Rob's hand and led him into the living room. I turned off all our lamps and we hugged in the glow of the Christmas tree lights. Some nights just really capture what family and having kids is all about.
(And then Teancom woke up screaming at midnight. That's reality for you.)
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