Today, being as close to Christmas as we can get without it actually being Christmas, we finally got our tree. I have been putting off the purchase of a fake tree for a long time, because although fake trees always have that nice symmetrical look and would probably actually look stylish and attractive given my haphazard decorating and non-matching ornaments, I actually enjoy the whole process with a real tree. Everything from the trudging out to tag the one we want in mid-November to collecting it, figuring out how to get it home, setting up the darn stand, and cleaning up dead pine needles for weeks after, it’s all symbolic of Christmas to me and I want to keep it that way for Ethan and Amy. So yeah, no fake tree for us again this year; instead another wonky, bedraggled-looking branch of a much larger tree with sagging twigs and castoff needles everywhere. Love it. Its look is much improved by the addition of a multitude of homemade decorations from bread dough, shiny cardboard, and popsicle sticks, all with some amount of glitter. No, really, I love it.
This year the kids have also celebrated, in a minor way, Hanukkah. Their preschool provided a menorah and dreidels for the children to see and play with because one of the girls is Jewish. It was a novelty for me as much as them because I don’t know any observing Jewish people and so what little I know of Hanukkah is academic.
The other day I mentioned that of the six Christmas cards we’d received to date, only one had any religious imagery (we’re not at all religious, but still). I said something to Mike about the lone card with Sweet Baby Jesus being held by Mary, which led to Ethan’s very serious explanation about God being real and Jesus being God’s son and his friend at preschool told him so, ergo true. This ties in nicely with Ethan’s first Easter service last year from which he returned to tell us that Jesus was old and lived in a cave with dinosaurs (Jesus + cave + old = dinosaurs, obvs).
Amy’s newest and weirdest sentence structure to date is “I can want to [fill in the blank]!” When we go somewhere: “I can want to come too?” When she wants us to watch her jumping: “You can want to watch me!” I keep telling her that sure, it’s okay to want to, but that doesn’t mean nothin’, but she just looks at me like I’m the crazy one.
