Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Tidings of Comfort and Joy


Time to trim the tree

Hooray, it's Christmastime! Was I feeling all full of angst and weltschmerz a mere week and a half ago? Now we are listening to Christmas music and soon I intend to address Christmas cards and we have our tree up and we are even having a gorgeous cold snap-- I am full of Christmas cheer, in other words. This has happened to me for several years now, and I think the problem is that the very first harbingers of the Christmas season are the commercials and Black Friday and the consumerism, and ugly black harbingers they are. But then we get into the actual holiday season and all the things I love about Christmas and Advent and my gloom passes.

Sweet girls

This past weekend, we brought our house firmly into Christmas mode by putting up our tree. I grew up with artificial trees because some of my family is very allergy prone, so there is still a certain level of novelty and daring to a real Christmas tree for me. The smell, the earthiness, the intense prickly green of the needles... There is a wonderful, magical strangeness to this syncretistic pagan tradition. We cut down a TREE and bring the whole thing into our HOUSE? Crazy.

Crazy beautiful.

Finished!

2 comments:

Kiki said...

Grace looks so old! And pretty.

Old as in non-baby.

Tina said...

The girls do look beautiful. And I got a giggle because at first glance it looked like you had put a Bam-Bam style pony tail on the top of Violet's head. And then I realized it was just the tree behind her. :)