Black Friday

Everyone,

No I did not go out shopping today. I decided to just do it from home. Gotta love internet shopping sometimes. They even had some of the good deals online as well as in the store. I think I am pretty much done with shopping this year, just a few more odds and ends to pick up. Oh, and something for Juice. He is SO hard to buy for!

We pulled out our Christmas tree this evening (Juice had to work and then he actually got a hair cut!) and Butterfly was so funny. She said, "Look Mommy! It's the biggest and best tree of all!" I remember thinking that of this very tree when I was little. She is enchanted with the lights. She also thinks that the ornaments are toys and wants to arrange them on the tree so 'friends' can talk to each other. We only put up the 3 we bought this year (every year we buy a new one) and we will put up the rest tomorrow.

When I was in high school, my parents bought a new pre-lit tree. I convinced them to let me use the old tree as a decoration for a dinner we were having at our house in high school. It was for a school dance and my dad cooked us burgers (I think it was around Halloween, we were all dressed up in 50's clothes). Anyway, my friends and I carved pumpkins, put blankets on the unfinished basement walls and hung twinkle lights from the ceiling. We also put crepe paper all over the old Christmas and put it in the corner. I don't remember if the dinner was good (it probably was) but my date was awful. I had had a huge crush on him for a long time and I finally got up the nerve to ask him out. Long story short, he was rude, bored and didn't even try to hide it. Crush ended that very night.

However, the decorations did not end that night. Or the next, or the next 30 nights. Over the next few years, the blankets came down and I took down the twinkle lights to take to college. I think I even threw out the rotted husks of carved pumpkins a year later. (Yes, a year. It was in Utah and things don't mold there like they do here! It just shriveled and looked like a sad sad grey heap.) The tree was down in the basement with that crepe paper on it until Juice and I were married.

My parents had decided to actually finish the basement and wanted to throw out the tree. We couldn't afford a tree that first year of being married. We needed a tree, they didn't want this tree. A win/win situation for everyone. We packed it up with the rest of our meager belongings and used it every year since. My parents bought it the year after my brother was born for 80 dollars. This year would mark the 28th Christmas this tree has seen.

Most of the year it spends it's time up in our attic wrapped in a big white sheet looking strangely like a body in a bag. But when you pull it out, pull the branches down, and put lights on it, and pile presents under it, it really is the biggest and the best tree ever.

Safire