"...and a Pekin in a Yule Tree"

I have had Christmas carolls running through my head all weekend. 

 Spell check says that isn't how to spell "carolls"; I say bugger spell check.

Friday after work, I hooked up with the rest of the clan and we went to Anderson's Tree Farm in Newberry to pick out the annual Yule Tree.  There are always many choices.  We generally go to the oversized tree section, but this year Merle steered us to the normal sized tree section in hopes we would weed out one of the bigguns that were crowding some of the young'uns.  We found an eleven foot fir that suited us just fine (there is actually a back story to this about the wee MacKinnons and their dissatisfaction with said tree, but I won't go there- okay I will...they said it was "skimpy".  Did I mention it was eleven feet tall??).

This was because they were off fooling around and sledding while the grown ups were doing all the work!

It was cold and getting dark.

The type of day that made me think of how our ancient ancestors must have felt; that maybe the darkness would never go and perhaps it would be nice to have a bit of greenery in the dwelling 

and a great big fire to take to sun down in the longest evening of  the shortest day

and ensure its rising on the next...

There is always a bit of face making and fooling around too.

Yuck!  I know where that hat has been!

The tree cooled it's heels in the garage that evening and managed to make it smell pretty good in there.

He came in on Saturday to warm up and get dressed.

This is an all day event of course.  All the decorations are in the attic over the garage so the Wildebeast has to make several trips up and down rickety steps to gather all the Rubbermaid tubs and bring them in.

Then the slapping of wee hands and the gnashing of wee teeth occurs while the tree is unfurled and robed in lights.   We had six sets of 50 lights; hardly adequate for an eleven foot tree so I ran into town to see if they had any LED lights that would match ours.

  No. Of course not.

So we found some strings of non-LED lights (what the heck are THEY called?), and put two on the tree because we needed them anyway in order to hook up the blinking candles (which are very cute) and they don't attach to the new lights.  About half of them actually lit up. Five hours, two beers, "A Christmas Story", and fifty boxes of decorations later, we found six more unopened boxes of lights.  Not to be deterred, I slapped two more of them on the tree after squinching the previous rows up a bit.  It works. Mostly.

Sam says if you squint at it, it makes the lights look much cooler.  When I do that, it reminds me of a Christmas party from my twenties in which too much Paisano was consumed!

Duncan wonders why we don't have a tree with just white lights on it and decorations that aren't kids toys.

I told him that was how our trees used to look; all color coordinated and "classy".

 Now we have a tree that is a chaotic riot of color.  Much like our lives.

I like them much better this way.

(except for the teddy bears in the pink tutus...they stayed in the box this year!)