O Tannenbaum

Ai, yai, yai. 

Something most people don't think about when considering the life of a physician is how crazy busy the month of December can be due to all the people wanting to get treated before the beginning of a new deductible year. I think it may even be especially busy for surgeons who have patients that want to recuperate during the holiday break. Brandon just texted me to say he has no less than NINE vasectomies scheduled for December 28th! Not that either of us are complaining about him having plenty of work, but it does make the already crazy month of December even crazier for the "single" mom at home. 

Should I share that I haven't even purchased a single Christmas present yet? Or done my Christmas cards? Or even taken a picture for the Christmas card? (I seriously think I may stoop to the level of an e-card this year, and I'm not even joking about that.) 

(And did I mention that this gifted program is going to be the death of me? Furrowed brow, shaking head, flared nostrils, pursed lips.) 

But one thing we have done already is put up our Christmas tree. We drove home from Arizona the day after Thanksgiving specifically so we could do our usual Thanksgiving weekend tradition of picking out a real live tree. It took another week to get the lights up, and we did get started on some of the decorations earlier this week, but I'm hoping we'll get a fair amount of Christmas "work" done this coming weekend and finish it up. The only things on the calendar right now are a work party tonight and our church party tomorrow night. 

And snow. SNOW is finally on the schedule! I have visions of being in my pajamas with my laptop and my amazon.com prime account at my fingertips while snow blows around outside my window and carols play throughout the house. Sounds like my kind of Saturday. 

But back to our lovely little (ahem, gargantuan) tree. 

As I said, we went to our usual favorite tree farm (just a mere 5 minutes from home), got our big stick that indicates the minimum height for cutting, and off we went in search of this year's "perfect" tree:

It was a beautiful day. Cool and sunny. Or "moony" as it were:

After long last (there were more contenders this year than ever before), we came to agreement on this one:

(The consensus may or may not have had to do with some members of the family being sick of looking and ready to go to our traditional after tree hunting meal at Texas Roadhouse.)

The ritual chainsaw massacre followed by a tractor ride to the car. Kate and I had a little talk with the tree, thanking it for sacrificing its life for our holiday enjoyment. We assured it that this was much nobler than becoming toilet paper:

We've had a little bit of snow on the mountain tops for awhile now:

We felt confident in getting a little larger tree than usual since we have rather high ceilings in our living room (and all the trees cost the same amount no matter the size), but it wasn't until Brandon and I worked together to get this baby up on the car top that we started to think maybe it was a little too big:

Sure enough, when we got it home, we realized that trees look much smaller in the great outdoors than they do inside a house! Even one with a high ceiling: 

Does this look like Clark Griswold or what? Ya, it's kind of been a pretty pain:

(And that gray tarp underneath has become a favorite poo poo and pee pee spot for the puppy! Argh!)

Like I said, it took Brandon over a week to get all the lights up. He even bought extra strands in advance this year, knowing there would be some old ones that had "gone bad." Didn't matter. We still didn't have enough! So after making a mid-week trip to Target for more lights, and once he finally came home from the hospital again the following weekend, and after figuring out what was tripping the lights on the upper half of the tree . . . we started decorating. (Now if we can just figure out why half the lights on the exterior of our house are out. This whole light thing is reminding me of that song "The 12 Pains of Christmas". But the end result is worth it, right?

We even made our first batch of Christmas cookies that night: 

(For more about that, here's a link to today's Motherhood Matters post.)

It doesn't seem like much, but I've been kind of pooped lately, so by the end of the day the kitchen looked like this:

And I looked like this:

It's nice to make things look all perfect and rosy for the blog (for myself), but there's always that dose of reality looming in the background. Or the forefront. And our December this year has a whole lot of reality.

It's still the best time of the year . . .