Christmas tree time!

How often do family events actually go down the way you envision them?  We haven't had a real tree in many years and decided to cut down our own this year.  We picked the girls up from school and headed to a local tree farm with the chainsaw in the truck.  My vision:  all five of us scoping out the trees, picking the largest, most perfect one, singing Christmas carols as we drove home, then merrily decorating it while drinking hot chocolate and singing more carols.  Reality:  the tree farm was completely picked over and I think at the end of it's life. Trees were few and far between and it was so soggy and muddy from recent rain that neither Cadence nor Laurel wanted to walk in the field.  Brad, Sierra, and I finally agreed on one and as we were putting on top of the car Sierra commented that she didn't really like it which frustrated me.  She then spent the car ride home saying that it was "fine"... no carols were sung.  The typical fiasco with the lights ensued when we got home and the tree was so prickly that the kids wanted to stop putting ornaments on when we were only halfway through!

Even with all of that, though, the excitement of decorating our house for Christmas with our family of five still makes me giddy.  We are so lucky to have been blessed with three wonderful girls and times like this make the blessings feel even richer!  Eventually the girls got into silly mode while we decorated and we listened to Justin Beiber's Christmas music (although I think he just recorded his usual stuff and threw in a few "snow" and "holiday" phrases to pass it off as a Christmas CD!).  We reminisced while we pulled out all of the ornaments, telling their stories as we place them on the tree.  I got the honor of placing the star on top of the tree!  Despite the fact that it didn't happen as I had hoped it would, it happened like it was supposed to... and we did it together and we had fun!

She wore this for exactly 10 seconds!

Is there any man who isn't happy holding a chainsaw?

 I feel the "tween-ness" coming on

But eventually got a smile!

And she got silly later!

If only I could wrap them up and keep them like this forever!

Again with the silly!  Love it!

Cadence was very intentional with her tree decorating...

... and very specific!

One of my favorite pictures

Shiloh amidst the wrapping

Taking a break from tree decorating to work with Sierra on perfecting her "running man"!

The star

Later in the week I had the honor of photographing my dad playing Santa at the children's rehabilitation hospital.  I remember going around the neighborhood with him when I was a child, caroling with a group of people while he went door to door and handed out candy canes to each house.  Now that he is old older and his beard is white he grows it out after summer and wears his Santa hat everywhere he goes for the month of December.  He LOVES the joy and questions he gets from children and covets his role as Santa.  He was honored to take this part in the hospital celebration.  I only wish I could show pictures of the kids as they went to sit on his lap (privacy issues, etc).  I don't know who was smiling more - the kids or my dad!  It was a wonderful evening!

Santa with the Shriner's