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Tying Knots on Trees

This past week my family and I decided to get an early start on the upcoming holiday season. We got in a car the day before Thanksgiving and selected a Christmas tree for our home. This is the first year we were going to have a real tree in our home for the holiday season. Last year we happily purchased a three foot tall fake tree with lights. There is a photograph somewhere of my holding our very young son in front of the tree as he stared wide eyed looking at the small lights. As he is older this … Continue reading →

Tree Sitting

One of the difficulties my family faced when we moved from a geography with four seasons and loads of foliage to an almost desert is a lack of trees. The ones that exist are far from native and the placement is always forced rather than natural. Nothing grows by accident (that’s a gross oversimplification). At any rate, for years we’ve sort of ignored the trees that did exist as mocking tributes to our respective childhoods in a different climate. The cost of this, however, was that our son never really interacted with trees the way we did. When I was … Continue reading →

Decorations

Last time I wrote about the trials and tribulations of getting a Christmas tree into the house. This is the first time we’re decorating for Christmas. This is for the benefit of our son as he was quite young last year. We want him to be able to identify that something special is going on by virtue of the decorations that, we hope, will occur year after year for the rest of his life with us during the holiday. My wife and I both remember these types of decorations being special memories with our own families. To that end my … Continue reading →

Keeping Kids Busy During Winter Break

You know winter break may be wearing out its welcome when you send your kid outside to play with his Crayola Sidewalk Paint Sprayer in the snow and subzero windchill. My neighbor’s 8-year-old spent a good chunk of this afternoon decorating snow banks with a toy typically reserved for warm weather fun. The sight prompted me to phone his mother and share a chuckle. I called, but she wasn’t laughing. Apparently, my neighbor sent her son outside (with multiple layers of snow gear on) to regain her sanity. The kid, who’s in week two of his Christmas break from school, … Continue reading →