Getting Ready For Christmas

The year before Mallory went on her mission, I put up the tree before Thanksgiving because she was leaving for Tennessee on November 1st.  I wanted her to have a taste of the Christmas Holiday before she left.  What I found out was I really liked having sharing the decorations of Thanksgiving and Christmas and by setting things up before Thanksgiving we can actually enjoy the spirit of the holidays all that much longer.  Ever since then I've made it a habit of setting up Christmas on Veterans Day.  That is a holiday for the county.  This year veterans day landed on a Wednesday so I took Thursday and Friday off and have enjoyed a nice long weekend.  Neal and I pulled down the Christmas Tree for one last year.  We have two rows of lights that will not work on the tree and it is not fixable.  The tree is 19 years old and Neal finally admitted that it was time to get rid of it.  We did go look at threes at Modern Display but Neal wasn't quite ready to buy on for this year.  We will go back the day after Christmas and get one a bit smaller and one that we can actually lift down and put away by ourselves.  We spent the day getting the house all decked out for the holidays and it is nice to have that done.  We don't know what the holidays are going to look like this year but it is looking more and more like the pandemic will keep us from not only gathering for Thanksgiving but not gathering for Christmas either.  Hard year for families that like to get together for good food, conversation, catching up and games.

A cute winter picture of Lightyear and Brinkley on a winter walk.  Notice the snow boots on Brinkley.

Neal working diligently for 4 hours trying to replace lights and get the tree to light up, but to no avail.  It was after spending all that time and having no luck is when he admitted that it was time to put the tree in the nearest dumpster after this year.  

The camel, bear, elephant and Santa are four handmade decorations made for me by my boss.  He has given me one each year for the past 4 years.  I'm anxious to see what he comes up this year.

Working on decorating the tree.

The little hedgehog ornament is hung in honor of Derek.

This last picture shouldn't be here but I don't, for the life of me know how to delete it.  You will see it on my next blog where it should be!