The spirit is alive

I suppose you can say that the Christmas spirit has awakened within me. I don't know that it's as prevalent as always, but it's there. I purchased a bunch of toys for our Toys for Tots drive at work. We are having free pictures with Santa at the office on Friday night so people can bring their kiddos by and drop off an unwrapped gift too. I love doing stuff like that. I waited for the new camera to arrive before taking a shot of our tree:I think it turned out well, despite being so darned difficult to decorate. I prefer the sturdy branches of my artificial tree, but this was easier to set up and the clean up will be simple as well. I can just throw it on the curb.

We put lights on the house on Saturday morning before heading to Six Flags for Holiday in the Park that night. It was pretty chilly once the sun went down but that was perfect weather to enjoy all the Christmas lights and hot cocoa. We took my little brother and he had a blast, although we couldn't convince him to ride many of the rides. He went with Nick once in the spring, and he managed to get him on a small roller coaster. It scared Trey to death and he declared that he might be ready to do that again "once he turned 8", but for now he was done with roller coasters. He loved the snow hill though. It was quite a popular attraction, mainly because we just don't get much snow here in Texas. Fake though it was, everyone seemed to enjoy it and I had plenty of opportunity to practive my shutter speed settings on my new camera while the guys were in line.

Sunday afternoon we put lights up on my mother-in-law's house. My husband is quite tired of climbing on the roof for, well, at least a month, right? Isn't that a beating...you do all this work to put up the lights and then in a month you have to take it all back down. It would just be easier to hire someone for that I think. We could join the ranks of the local rednecks and just leave them up all year, but that's unbearably tacky and I can't bring myself to do that. I will confess to you though that I once left a strand of lights wrapped around the trunk of a tree in my front yard. I suppose that I just missed a strand, although I'm not sure how I managed to do that because I got all the rest of the lights off. They stayed on that tree so long that the trunk started growing around them, and by the time I noticed it was too late to completely remove all of the wires and bulbs. I cut off as much as I could, but I suppose there are still bits and pieces of those lights stuck in the trunk of that tree. I don't live there anymore so I can't go check. Interesting though, right? I felt bad for the poor little tree.