Christmastime Is Here

I don't know why but for some reason Lee and I just weren't really in the Christmas mood.  Black Friday sucked.  We went out "late," missed our opportunity to buy the laptop bundle we wanted at Best Buy, ended up buying a laptop online in the parking lot at 1:30 am from Office Depot, and went to 2 different Wal-Mart's only to discover that neither of them had the movie Brave.  At least we got this pretty sweet Samsonite luggage at Ross later on in the day after we went home to sleep.

Then we skipped our tradition of buying and setting up our tree later that day.  So far we had done it that way since we'd been married, but this year, our 5th Christmas together, we chose to break that tradition.  I usually can't wait to set up the tree, so I was a bit upset about the whole thing.  But it wasn't like Lee was to blame.  Like I said, we both just weren't feeling up to it...

On Saturday we decided to decorate.  While we were unpacking the Christmas decorations, we realized why people pay money to get climate-controlled storage lockers.

Later that day we went out to look for a tree.  We found a beautiful one at Houston Garden Center...  We went out to buy some more lights for it, then came home to decorate.

 Aww!  Isn't it cute?!

We picked it out from this row of its brothers and sisters.  Now we have our very own little rosemary bush/tree/thing.  It smells really good, and we're pretty sure we can cook with it too.

We decorated the tree (which took all of 20 minutes...and that included the time it took us to sort through all of our ornaments and pick out the few we wanted) and threw up all the other decorations - the Christmas dish towels, a snowman tart burner, our Willow Tree Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus plaque, and a few other things.  We were done in record time.  Then we exchanged ornaments, which we've started doing the past few years.  I got Lee the 5 pointed Peace star to symbolize our 5th year together, and he got me 4 little owls in pink and purple since those are some of my favorite colors and I've been really into owls lately.  I loved them!  And at that moment, it started to feel a little more like Christmas.  :)

 
~Hooks