Day 21 - Tree

I always let the kids help me decorate the Christmas tree. I'm not obsessive about the placement of ornaments, and quite frankly, I'm glad to have help with the chore. That's right, it's a chore. I love having the tree up and glowing; I hate the putting it up part, probably even more than the taking it down part.

We have a fake tree, so I do the assembly - and this year I even had help with that because they think it's fun - and put on the lights. Then I find all of the kid-safe ornaments and untangle them while they fight over sort them into piles. Then they put them on. Sometimes it's haphazard, sometimes they are all clumped together in one place, and last year they were sorted by color. I do not care as long as they get on the tree.

This was Luke's first year to really understand what was happening, and he fully embraced the decorating. This is his branch.

Luke's branch of the Christmas tree.

He put all of his ornaments in a one-foot radius around this branch. If I were an obsessive tree decorator, we would have issues because he knows exactly where he put each ornament and, should one happen to be moved, he loses his head about it. We had approximately 10 minutes of hostage-crisis negotiations when Ella took his Pooh ornament to put on the little tree in her room. Pooh was returned safely to the branch with the rest of his crew in exchange for Cinderella's castle.