It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

After a slow start, preparations for Christmas seemed to ramp up this weekend. There's still shopping to be done, cookies to be made and wrapping, wrapping, and more wrapping to complete. But it finally smells like a Christmas tree in our house, so all is good with the world. We always had a real tree when I was growing up. I don't remember ever going out to cut a tree, my dad usually brought one home from the Co-op store in town. I don't know whether he waited until the selection was poor, or just had a thing for Charlie Brown Christmas trees, but we had some seriously sad looking trees! It got to be a real joke, waiting to see how miserable the tree would be from one year to the next. Fortunately Dave loves a real tree too, so we've had one ever since we had a house with space to put one up. He and Aaron set off to the tree lot on Saturday and picked out the nicest tree we've ever had. The star touches the ceiling and it's so broad at the base that you can barely squeeze past it. It's gorgeous and soft and fragrant.

We set it up yesterday, let it thaw out, and got the lights on before the kids went to bed. I had been telling Meredith a few days earlier about the thing I loved to do best when I was a kid at Christmastime. After the tree was set up, I loved to lay with my head under the bottom branches, looking up at the lights, wallowing in that delicious scent, and feeling the cool breeze on my face as the tree continued to thaw. She asked if we could do it last night, and it was a thrill to share that pleasure with my own kids.

And yes, Aaron is naked.

We got the decorations on today and that was another trip down memory lane. Memory lane detours to the nut house if you take the wrong turn and have a two year old who insists on using a step stool to reach 'UP HIGH' in the tree....

This afternoon we set out to make gifts for the kids' teachers - the special people at daycare, school, and lessons that make their lives so much richer. We transformed these empty jars:

into Holiday Candy Cookie Mix.

Not without running out of ingredients part of the way through the task, of course!

After the size-small helpers were fast asleep I finished off the tags and they're ready to go. Sealed to keep salivating mouths from swiping any more M&Ms!

This week is the school Christmas Concert, so we've got another first to look forward to. Hopefully we'll sneak some more moments under the Christmas tree amidst the frenzied pace.