Today was a mixture of work and pleasure for me... Today I spent half of the studying and preparing myself for finals week and the other half spending time with the family. Today we celebrated my little sister's twentieth birthday and my nephew's seventh birthday with a family get together... My little sister's birthday is actually tomorrow, and my nephew's was last week, but since he spent it with his father we waited to celebrate both of them together.
One of my favorite family traditions is when we get our Christmas tree... every year Crista has always made sure that the Christmas tree would be put up the week-end before her birthday, which happened to fall on this week-end... yesterday my dad and sister went and picked it out, that is their little father daughter thing they do every year.... and today he and my sister's boyfriend brought it inside to decorate. We always have Christmas carols playing and hot chocolate being made. My dad and I always put the lights up together. It is always funny to me to watch him fret over untangling the lights and making sure no one steps and breaks them... I have always been the "light" helper since I was about eight I believe. I stand their and make sure the lights don't get tangled up as he is placing them in the tree... after that he then climbs up to our attic to bring down the Christmas tree decorations.
I always enjoy putting the ornaments on the tree... there are certain ones that will always be special to me. You see, every year since my younger sister was born my dad handmade us all our own special ornaments. He buys special wood and then uses his table saw to cut them out and then he paints them with special oil paints. I always laugh because most of them he always places a cross or rosary in the design... it's like his little trademark. He also paints our names and the year. He has made me a santa clause one, frosty the snowman, a manger scene, angel, shepherd, so forth and so on. I love them dearly and always get excited to see which new design he comes up with for my annual ornament.
After the tree gets decorated he always pulls out egg nog and then makes a toast... it's traditions like these that I love to do with my family. Now that the house smells like pine and the tree is here I finally am really and truly feeling like it is Christmastime.
2 comments:
I love this too..it gets a little harder each year as you all are bigger and taller and I get all sentimental inside. The ornaments are very special, indeed..what a very precious personal tree we have and ah the smell of fresh pine too. :)
Some day when you have a tree of your own just imagine that you will have a whole bunch of very special ornaments to put on it. So much nicer than those "keepsake" ones from the comercials because your daddy made them for you. How special is that?
Katy took her ornaments to her apartment this year. I am a bit sad that we won't see them on our tree this year, but that was the point of getting her a new ornament every year, that some day she would have a whole box of ornaments to start her own tree with.
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