On Friday morning I did NOT get up at the crack of dawn and go shopping…heck, I don’t think we have any stores here that opened before 8 a.m.! I might enjoy the whole “crack of dawn shopping with the masses” post Thanksgiving experience if I had “women” to do that with (and lived somewhere you could do that!) but instead, I got up, made some hot chocolate and found everything that the kids were wishing for on Toys R Us.com, Walmart.com and Amazon.com. No hassle, no lines, no crowds, no shopping carts, no searching and searching…it was super easy and painless!

Josh ran some errands and we ate leftovers and enjoyed a slow day at home. We had plans for all of us to go see “Santa Claus 3” but Maggie was not feeling well, so I stayed home with Maggie, Marcus and Belane and Josh took the rest of the kids to the movie. I got the little three in bed early and watched most of “The Family Man” while I waited for the rest of them to get home.

Saturday was the day we got our Christmas tree. When I was little, “getting a Christmas tree” involved driving around to one, two or three (some years more!) Christmas tree “lots” and finding the perfect tree amongst piles of others in a parking lot.

When Josh and I got married and lived in New York, we started a tradition of driving out to a Christmas tree “farm”, which involved riding out on a tractor, being dropped off with a saw in a field of trees grown for the purpose of being Christmas trees, finding the right one, cutting it down and riding the tractor back to the car.

Now we live in a place where people spend $5 on a permit, and then go up any one of countless mountain roads and find a perfect Christmas tree growing in the national forest. Chainsaws, trucks, snowmobiles and lots of warm clothes are tools of the trade, and oftentimes it is a big family event here…with lots of extended family going out together to get several trees.

We don’t have snowmobiles and our 15 passenger van was not exactly built for snow travel, but the combination of less than average snow on the ground this year and the fact that two guardian angels went and bought brand new snow tires for our van, made it possible for us to get our van up the mountain so we could all go together to get our tree.

We bundled everyone up and drove about 15 minutes up the mountain from our home, where we found an ideal spot to let the kids loose and hunt for the perfect tree. There was enough snow on the mountain that they had lots of fun with snowballs, snow angels, etc. and Mercy and I ended up carrying Marcus and Belane after a while. We found a great tree after about 20 minutes, and after a unison shout of “TIMBER” and lots of cheering, Josh cut it down and had all of the boys help him carry it back down to the van.

We had lunch at Burger King and then went home and watched one of the Christmas movies I had taken out of storage while the little ones napped.

After our rest it was 5 p.m. and we bundled back up and headed down town for the “Parade of Lights”, which is a big holiday tradition here. There is free hot chocolate and cookies and lots of floats decked out with holiday decorations, music and of course, LIGHTS. It’s really beautiful and the kids love it. Besides their hot chocolate and cookies they also got a ton of candy and some fun glow sticks.

It was as close to “perfect” as a day gets…we enjoyed everything! It was emotional too…when Josh was outside getting the tree off of the van and into water, he teared up saying how “cool” it was that this was our first Christmas with our whole family together. We have so much to be thankful for this year…we have had a lot to be thankful for every year since we’ve been married, but this year we are both really feeling it.

Yesterday we went to church in the morning and then spent the afternoon resting and just sort of hanging out. We got everyone to bed early because we knew this morning was going to come around quickly.

And that was pretty much our Thanksgiving break in a nutshell. Now it's back to business. :)

More soon!