Getting ready for the holidays

Going in to it, I knew this was going to be a busy weekend. It started right after work on Friday when we went to the First Friday event. Saturday I woke up late, spent a few hours helping a friend with his website and then took a nap before we headed out to my company holiday party. Since we didn’t get in until late, and we had a few cocktails at the party, I was expecting to sleep in on Sunday. Oh how wrong I was.

Our day started around 6:45 this morning with our dogs waking us up to be let outside. Neither of us were able to go back to sleep, so we got up and headed out to pick up the boxes of Christmas decorations from storage. We also brought home a 9 foot artificial Christmas tree that somebody gave us. When we got it home we realized that it was going to be too big to place in the spot where we normally put our Christmas tree. So we started working on alternate locations. The process was not going well, to say the least. Ultimately we decided not to use the new tree and went back to our old standby. An artificial tree that belongs to my Mother-in-Law. We’ve used it at our house for the past 5 years and it’s served us pretty well, I must say. Once we put the tree together and strung it with lights, we let the kids decorate it with ornaments. This is a lengthy process as we have amassed quite a collection of them over the years.

With the tree taken care of it was time to head outside to hang the Christmas lights outside. This is one of my leasts favorite things to do. It’s nerve wracking! We have a 2 story house and the Little Giant ladder we have gets us close, but with the unlevel ground and lava rock in our front yard, it makes for an interesting experience. I’m a bit of a thrill seeker, but get sorta freaked out being 2 stories up standing on the 2nd to last rung on a ladder.

When it’s all said and done, the house does look pretty nice.

As an amusing side-note, while we were using the ladder to hang the lights out front, a neighbor came over and made a comment about how nice the ladder was. He then carried on for a few minutes about a lightbulb that is burnt out on his front porch. Somehow, after we were done with the lights, my brother-in-law and I ended up dragging my ladder over to the neighbor’s house and changing the bulb for him. Call it my good deed for the day, I guess.

So the lights are hung, the tree is trimmed and the neighbor’s porch light is a-glow with holiday cheer. Yep, the holidays are here.

Related posts:

1. Do the holidays bring out the worst in people?
2. Creating new holiday traditions
3. Christmas and Family
4. Enjoying more family and some sillyness
5. Proof I need new tires