December Is Here

Yet, this is what we were up to a couple days ago:

Before you ask, no, I have no idea why Oscar's swim trunks are so huge on him. 

It's a matching set, yet the rash guard is the same size, but almost looks like it won't fit him for much longer. 

Either he's built weird or someone mislabeled something.

It's getting a little hard to get into the whole Christmas thing this year. I've never before realized just how much of it revolves around snow, despite how rarely it actually snows on Christmas day. I grew up in the northeast, and while we often had snow just before or after, there were many years that Christmas looked more brown than white. Ironically, when we lived in Washington, it did snow on Christmas day last year. I suspect that will not be repeated this year.

I can tell when Wyatt is dealing with a bout of homesickness for his first home when he gets all nostalgic about how much he "just loves snow". Poor kid; next year, we are going skiing. With all the moving and traveling, it just wasn't possible this year.

We did spend some time putting up our tree tonight, though. Typically, I procrastinate and the tree goes up a few days ahead of time, but I figured we needed extra help getting into the spirit of things this year. Good thing we have a fake one. Otherwise, we would have had to dress up the coconut tree in our yard. That would probably have been more interesting, though...

Wyatt did so well at matching the colors and hooking the branches into the trunk 

that I think this will be his job next year.

After we assembled the somewhat dusty-smelling tree, we discovered a bit of a problem: we have no lights. Last year, several of our strings developed shorts in them, so I tossed about half of them, intending to buy new ones this year. There were a couple strings left, but apparently they either ended up in storage or somehow vanished in the move. In most places, this would be no big deal. Here, the solution is a little more complicated. I could wait to see if they will have any in the store this month, but a. they may not have any and b. someone else could easily buy them up before I see them (which is what happened to the very few bags of fresh cranberries the store got this Thanksgiving - grrr). So, I guess I'm going to be looking for some online tonight.

We did crack open a couple of the ornament boxes (ok, the boys actually got to them first and had the entire Nativity set lined up on a nearby table while we were searching for lights; that was kind of cute) and let Wyatt and Oscar hang up ornaments until they were bored. Since we will have to try to get lights on later, I didn't care where they chose to hang them. Oscar's idea of ornament hanging was something like this:

When Wyatt was his age, we had no problems with him pulling things off the tree. Oscar, though, is probably going to be a bit more challenging. I've already had to stop him from eating a glass candy cane ornament. In fairness, it really does look like a real candy cane. What actually brought the incident to my attention was his frustration at not being able to remove the string dangling from the top of it. That is one of the few ornaments hanging high in the tree now. I think a lot of the more fragile ones we didn't open yet will just stay in the box this year.