So the Season Begins...

I suppose the holiday season has officially begun. For the second year in a row, I haven't finished Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving. (In my defense, I wasn't back in the States until December last year). Thankfully, I just have to finish shopping for Emily this time around. Tonight, we put up our Christmas tree. It's the first live tree I've ever had. We're using the old, wooden Christmas tree decorations from when I was a kid. Actually, they're the ones we used when I was a kid. My Mother wouldn't let those near her tree. They were what hung on the tree that the kids got to decorate. We mixed in a bunch of gold ornaments Emily had from when she was a kid.

As we do most years, we make a kind of big deal out of this particular event. (I tend to go Clark W. Griswald during December). We made ginger bread men. Isaac loved them, but rarely took more than one bite of a cookie before putting it back and getting another one. We put on The Polar Express, which Em and Isaac both loved. Claire was amazed at the colored lights. Isaac was initially confused by the fact that I brought a tree into the house, but warmed up to it when he got to start putting things onto the tree.

By the time we finished Isaac would run to Emily and hug her. Immediately he'd run to me and hug me. Understand...Isaac doesn't hug without a four step running start. He successfully put Emily on her back once.

Otherwise, it's been a pretty good week. We had Thanksgiving dinner at Joe & Rochelle's yesterday, which was nice. On Wednesday, I had a meeting with a British chaplain. I'm helping with one of his Christmas services in a few weeks. It was a lot of fun talking with him on some of the differences between chaplains in the UK and the States.