Christmas is coming...

Christmas is officially underway here at our home. This year we took the plunge and put lights on the outside of our house. As is to be expected, it takes more time than you'd expect to put up lights, even really simple ones. But a few trips to the hardware store, a few borrowed ladders, a few hours out in the cold, and voila!

It feels festive, if a little plain. The boys were lobbying hard for the light-up moving reindeer at the store, but we successfully fended them off. Like pretty much everyone in America that doesn't live in a gated community, we've got a neighbor down the street with the full complement of flashing, multi-colored, electric holiday cheer sprawled across their yard - Santas, snowmen, reindeer, trains, et cetera. It does not approach the wonder of the full-yard Wizard of Oz holiday display that is around the corner from my relative's house in New Hampshire, but we all do what we can. Anyway, we take an evening walk sometimes to satisfy the boys' taste for such things and stick to our plain white icicle lights.

We also have our Christmas tree! It shares the same "kids live here" aesthetic as most things in our house. It's tilted and the lights and ornaments are not distributed quite right, but it smells nice.

It also has this handy little tunnel around it, just the right size for little boys to crawl through so they can hide behind the tree. The tunnel wasn't there when we got the tree, but the boys were thrilled that after snapping off just a few branches they had made their very own little Christmas den. Ah, well.

We're also into our December tradition of unwrapping a Christmas book each night before the boys head to bed. We started it last year, and it makes the whole month a little more festive and special. A few of the books are ours, but most are just from the library. It's fun to have wrapped things under the tree without the temptation of the boys' actual wrapped gifts sitting there for a whole month begging for them to peek.

We've also all but given up on any ornaments we've put out surviving the season. There are a few I just kept wrapped in boxes, and the Christmas tree balls are staying packed up for at least a few more years, but most I just recklessly put out for the kids to enjoy. I figure, what's the point of ornaments and decorations too delicate to be touched? So the boys pull things off the tree and play with them and arrange them on these shelves, and I'll see what we've got left at the end.

I'll get decorations I really love in a decade or so, and enjoy them for a few years before the grandkids come break them and burrow into our nicely decorated tree.