O Christmas Tree

I love Christmastime. I love picking out a tree, decorating, shopping for gifts, listening to Christmas music, baking sweet treats, seeing family. Some of my most peaceful, happy moments have been sitting in a dim living room, lit only by the lights on the Christmas tree. I love to curl up on the sofa in a big blanket, sip cocoa, listen to Vince Guaraldi's Charlie Brown Christmas album, and gaze at the tree. And if I have my husband and sweet girls with me, then it is happiness complete.

And now for some documentation of our Christmas preparations:

This is the first year Derek and I have CHOPPED our own tree! It was lovely, though I always imagined myself trudging through snow and hacking away with mittened, frozen fingers... But then, this is Texas.

So instead, at the very moment I stood posing cheerily and ignorantly for this photo, I was actually being munched on by fire ants. Ten bites on one foot. I guess that's what I get for wearing flip-flops to cut down a Christmas tree...

We hunted and hunted for the perfect tree, and though Ava was whining to return to the llamas and pigs and goats (at the barn), and Derek would have taken any of them, I persisted until we found the One. Yeah, I know. I was the annoying one who kept going back and forth through the rows of trees that looked pretty much the same [Sometimes I really see Derek and I playing out scenes from my childhood between my parents...].

(Derek used a saw, but it could've been cut down with a kitchen knife, truth be told)

PJ was such a trooper that we told her she could drive home, but then she was too fat to reach over her tummy to grab the wheel:

And then, the lovely sight that makes every blasted itchy little ant bite worth it:

And here I am with my cuddlebug, basking in Christmasy joyfulness: