One Thousand Lights

Jared and I have our roles and we play them well. I cook the dinner, he eats the dinner. I do the laundry, he splits the firewood. I set up the Christmas tree, he puts on the lights. The only problem with our little division of labor is that I'm never happy with the Christmas tree lighting situation. I always want more lights. This year we broke from our traditional jobs and I put on the Christmas tree lights.

We have seven strands of lights for our seven foot tree; that's 700 lights. After a quick google search to learn the best way to light a tree I set to work. Since I like lots of lights I wound and wrapped the strands around every. single. branch.  It took forever (a couple of hours start to finish) and by the time I got to the last of our 700 lights I still had a third of the tree left to light. So it was off to the store to buy three more boxes of lights. I hoped that an even 1,000 would do the trick. It just seemed like the right number because the boxes said that five sets could safely be connected end to end so ten strands should work perfectly. I finished lighting the tree, took a big step back, and realized that the very top of the tree still needed more lights. I hadn't spaced them out evenly enough but after some readjusting I was happy with our lighting situation and we could finally move on to the girl's favorite part of decorating for Christmas, hanging ornaments!

Each of our girls has their favorite ornaments that they claim as their own each year and insist on hanging on the tree. For Natalie, it's her glittery high heeled shoe ornament.  Yesterday we had the girls each choose a new ornament at Kathe Wohlfahrt and she chose a glittery hand mirror. That child definitely loves glittery, glitzy, glamour.

Our very own elf, Samantha, insisted that everyone wear some sort of Christmasy outfit or accessory. She chose to be Mrs. Claus in some hand-me-down pajamas for our tree decorating party. It really was a party - we had music, dancing, and even refreshments all thanks to the efforts of our sweet kids.

This picture was totally staged, but only because when I saw the two of them sharing a sweet sisterly moment Abigail immediately became silly.  Feelings make Abigail uncomfortable and her first line of defense against that discomfort is always to be silly or crack a joke. Being the good mother that I am, I forced them to recreate the sweetness because I wanted a good picture of these two beauties together.

Every year we have the girls vote for one of their sisters to have the honor of putting the star on top of the tree. The only rule is that they can't vote for themselves. Emily talked to all of her younger sisters and persuaded them to vote for Madison since it's her last year being at home for tree decorating. They mostly went along, Natalie forgot and voted for Emily instead, so Madison was the lucky girl who put the finishing touch on our tree.

Here's Abigail again, this time rocking her Christmas sweater and our tree skirt. Who do you think wore the tree skirt better - Abigail or the tree?

And the finished Christmas tree with 1,000 lights and looking just the way a Christmas tree should. Looks like Jared and I will have to switch up our Christmas tree roles from now on!