O Christmas Tree, o Christmas tree...

My favorite tradition at Christmas time is decorating the Christmas tree. There's nothing that makes a house a "home for the holidays" to me than the smell of a live Christmas tree. Tonight Mark and I went to get our Christmas tree. We normally get it earlier in December, but with the painting and redecorating, we had waited until all the painting was done. We usually follow the same traditions every year. We always go to the same tree lot, near our house, and usually its during the evening. It never fails that the night we go shopping for our tree, its always freezing(by California standards) so we bundle up. The Christmas tree lot is brightly lit with the smell of pine heavy on the air. We take our time walking around the lot for a while, looking at all the price ranges. We still marvel at how cheap the trees are compared to back home in Hawaii. When we are done browsing the different price catagories, we start our search in earnest. We try to find a tree that is as tall as we are, and that is a nice shape, avoiding the ones that are skewed or crooked. This year there were several that were skewed or brownish, and I began to worry if we had come too late in the season for any "good" trees. We reached the end of the row and we found it, the perfect tree for us. It was a full tree, with green needles that still had some bounce to them. We took it home, tied to the top of our car with twine, and brought it into the house. We turned on some Christmas music, to put us in the holiday mood. Mark's job is to string the lights on the tree. He starts with the star and then winds multicolored lights from the top down. As he is doing that, I start unpacking the ornaments. Mark and I buy an ornament every year for every Christmas that we have spent together, starting from when we first moved to California, so this year makes our 14th Christmas together. Each ornament is stored in its original box, and so I unbox each of our "special" ornaments, and line them up by year. When Mark is done with the lights, we put up each annual ornament, starting with 1993, and working our way to the present. We finish decorating the tree with ornaments bought on various trips. When its all done, we turn off the lights and admire our handiwork. This year the tree seems especially beautiful, as the rest of the decorating that we've been doing sets a wonderful backdrop on the scene. In the above picture, we caught Piers napping under the tree, and as we took the picture, Kitiara decided to check out the tree as well.