Well I have been very silent, but this was a great Christmas holiday. Our Christmas morning was the most relaxed holiday ever! We opened presents and enjoyed our traditional Christmas morning dose of biscuits and gravy. Then we walked all of thirty feet to Nana and Pop’s house and leisurely opened presents, cooked a little, opened more present and cooked a little more and so on until we had a delightful dinner.
The best part of the day was seeing the delight and excitement in our older boys eyes as they saw their siblings open the gifts they chose and paid for all on their own. Our oldest son had even wrapped his change and given it to one of our sons because, “he likes spending money.” We thought it was about three dollars, but upon opening it, we found it was fifteen dollars. He was quite happy to give his brother such a generous gift. Similarly, he spent about ten dollars more on earrings for my wife than I thought he should. He reason was, “but she will love these.”
This great holiday was preceded though by a wonderful holiday tradition. The annual tree slaughter. Although, we wait several months to kill our tree. We like to dig it up, take it home, nurture it, plant it in a beautiful spot and let it have a slow death as it is withers and dies from neglect. Not this year. This year is going to be different.
We found a beautiful fir tree and though it would be lovely to keep it a pot next to our trailer. It was about five feet tall and was perfect, but not for my oldest son. “NO. That one is too small.” No amount of convincing was going to sway him. Nevertheless, we dug it up anyway. My wife’s sister needed a tree. We searched high and low for the perfect big tree(you may wonder “Why a big tree? They live in a travel trailer.” Well, it will go outside). Finally, when we, and our friends were just about to give up and accept the perfect little tree, we found it. It was like out of that seen in “Christmas Vacation”, as the sun was setting, it broke through the trees and lit up the one we were to have. Heaven opened, pointed us to the tree and angels were singing, leading us the entire way.
That was a slight exaggeration, but we found it! It was about nine or ten feet (or twelve) tall and a perfect specimen. Ponderosa Pine do not usually make a good Christmas tree, but this was going to be the exception. It’s shape was great and it’s height was perfect. We were set to take it home, decorate it with edible ornaments and let the birds enjoy it. Well, when I finally got it stood up and next to our trailer, it was about three feet taller than the trailer and too large for us to decorate effectively. However, it did have popcorn and cranberry strings, popcorn balls and about eight strands of lights. Really, it was beautiful and surely would have made Clark proud!
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