In Which We Do Eventually Get a Christmas Tree

One sunny Saturday at the beginning of December, I had the bright idea that we should venture out to find a Christmas tree. Sounds innocent enough, doesn't it?
Well, on our way to get a tag, who should my children spy, but... Santa Claus!
So, of course, we had to stop and say hello to the old guy.
He was very happy to see us, of course, and sent each child on his or her way with a bag of candy and a can of pop.


(I know, this seems like an excess of Santa pictures. But, really, who would I leave out? So just keep scrolling. They'll end eventually.)








































So then we continued on our way, and you would think the next picture would be of us in the hills. But, no. I'm not actually sure what happened, since I was keeping track of children. Keeping track of the road -and the other cars on it- was supposed to be Jef's job. But suddenly he made a panicked kind of noise and I looked up just in time to see us hit the car in front of us. Turns out, our vehicle was much tougher than theirs. Our front license plate was ripped off, the front tow hooks were bent, and my knee smashed one of the A/C vents to smithereens. Other than that, the worst damage to our car was that all of that nice candy and soda pop that Santa gave us was suddenly at my feet in the front. So while Jef dealt with the other car - whose trunk was no longer functional - I was cleaning up a huge mess inside the car. The ambulance was for one of the kids in the back seat of the other car who wasn't wearing his seat belt and hit his head. But he turned out to be fine.

So then we set off again to find a Christmas tree.
And this time we made it!Jef and Ben decided that Ben should be the one to cut the tree down this year. Luckily we picked a tree with a very small trunk. I mean, we could have survived for several days on the candy and soda pop, but since the supply was damaged by Jef's adventure, that meant we really couldn't spend more than one night in the wild.

Turns out Ben is a great little lumberjack, and he had it down in no time at all.
So from here you'd think that we could throw the tree on top of Max and go home. But the pattern we had set earlier in the day continued to haunt us, and the kids just had to stop at a frozen pond and throw some rocks in. (Yes, Cannon is smiling at you.)
So, we did eventually make it home with our Christmas tree and even managed to get it decorated that night.

(OK, I admit it. I took this picture after Christmas, which explains why all the decorations are missing from the lower half of the tree.)

And they all lived happily ever after.