The annual putting up of the Christmas tree usually happens in our house right after Thanksgiving. Some years we have even been so busy, we didn’t get it up until Christmas Eve (no joke). Well, this year we thought it would be a good idea to go with a kind of themed tree. See we have a tradition annually of buying a dated Christmas ornament in the after-Christmas sales. (As you can see we are not too concerned with pagan tradition and we just go with the whole tree thing. Seriously now, no tree is going to shake my faith in Christ.) So we have lots of those ornaments and others that we normally decorate our tree with. But this year we thought it would be cool to go all one color (change of tradition kind of goes with the recent unexpected change in our life). So Jasmine put up the tree and Julian put on all the lights, but then we discovered that our old lights didn’t work. So we took then all off, and tried to fix them. That didn’t work. So we thought we may as well just go buy new lights. Dina and I went to the store and decided to get colored lights. We have always used all white and we like all white lights, but here was yet another fateful decision in the tree saga of 08 (the first being not testing the original lights before we put them on). We also decided to go all red bulbs so I also bought all red garland. We came home, put all the lights on, put the garland on, put the red bulbs on, and basically ended up with a tree that was so dark it was kind of pointless. Ugh. We need some happiness in the home right now and this was a bit dreary. So we thought “what if we changed from all red bulbs to all gold bulbs?” So Jasmine and I took all the red bulbs off, repackaged them and returned them to the store and bought all gold bulbs. We redecorated the tree…again. It was at that point that we realized the main challenge we had with our tree was the fact that we had gone with colored lights instead of all white. Dina vetoed the colored lights. So she went to the store and bought all white lights. Then Julian and I took all the gold bulbs off the tree. We took all the colored lights off the tree. We put the all white lights on the tree. We put the ribbon back on (the red garland having been jettisoned 2 rounds earlier) and finally, put all the gold bulbs back on. Now finally after 4 rounds we love our tree and it looks like a department store display which is pretty unique for us since we have several years of 4th grade ornaments and freebies we usually put on it. Ha ha. I wondered if there was some great Biblical correlation in all this so we could be spiritual and all, and I thought of the Joseph story. In Genesis 45 Joseph gave his bothers a change of clothing; but he gave Benjamin (his brother by Rachel) five changes of clothing and 300 pieces of silver. Well we had four changes and 50 gold bulbs. Maybe our redemption is coming in some way? 🙂 Anyway, here is our tree. Merry Christmas.
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