Christmas time is here!

Today we made our annual trek to Martins U-Cut to get our Christmas tree.  It is an unwritten rule that if you have a 19-foot ceiling, you need at least an 18-foot tree.  And that's what we got.  A beautiful noble fir.  It is always fun (not) to listen to people tell the same joke about putting a tree that tall onto a Honda Odyssey.  Yes, it works.  Yes, we've done it before.  Yes, it will fit in our house.  Yes the kids are all ours.....Same thing every year from every person at the tree farm.

Getting the tree up the hill and to the car is really the biggest problem with getting a tree that big.  Once you get it on top of the van, it's not a big deal.  And we were amazed once again at our Bowlings Last Stand tree stand that held up a hefty, tall tree without a problem.

The kids had fun hiding while we had the furniture pushed out of the way to bring the big tree into the house.

 When we get ready for Christmas, we have to listen to a certain CD.  It is Roger Whittaker's Christmas  album.  Once we have listened to that one while getting the tree into the house, we can move on to other Christmas CDs.  But it has to start with Roger.


One good thing about having 7 kids is that I can make them carry all the boxes of decorations up and down the stairs for me.  First, we had to pack away all the fall and Thanksgiving decorations.  As they went downstairs with a box of Thanksgiving stuff, I had them bring up a box of Christmas decorations.  It made quick work of a very big project.

Savanna and Zack got busy unpacking the Nativity sets today.  Savanna is in charge of the big fancy one, and Zachary is in charge of the little wooden one.  They take their jobs very seriously.

 Some people are OK with just a few strands of lights on a tree.  Some people are OK with about 10 strands of lights on a tree.  Some people need 20.  Some people need at least 30.  That's us.  Mark does everything first-class.  Every branch gets wrapped up and down so that the wires are undetectable. This is why we don't have Christmas lights on our house--it would take too much time to do it right, so he just doesn't get started.  I believe this tree had at least 32 strands of lights on it.  And it is bright!

We all helped decorate it after Mark got the lights blazing.  Seven kids, one mom and 3 ladders.

 

After we thought we had it all perfect, we shut off the lights to see what we had accomplished.  It took us an entire day, but I think it was all worth it.