Cozy Christmas

After years of going without, and then a couple years of only having the Charlie Brown Christmas tree...

Which isn't a bad little tree.

...we finally bit the bullet and bought an artificial tree. And lights. And ornaments. I think all in all we plunked down about $200 on the whole caboodle. The Dude went to the store without me, while I stayed home and worked, feeling under the weather, and he wound up calling from Home Depot asking for instructions on which tree to get. Pre-lit or not? How big? Which ornaments did I want?

I went online to look at everything and said things like, "I like the sparkly blue balls," and the Dude was like, "That's in the blue aisle, I'm in the red aisle!"And I'd say something like, "I didn't know there were colour-coded aisles! I can't see you!" "Why aren't you here? Ugh!" "Next time we buy a Christmas tree, I'll know better!"

It was wildly inefficient. But I must say the tree looks great. I had us budgeted for ornaments under a certain price and the Dude, in a fit of bravado after we got off our ridiculous phone call, made some independent holiday purchase decisions and loaded the cart with about twice the amount of Christmas we could sensibly afford.

But behold!

And I got my star instead of an angel, like the Dude wanted.
This was a harder sell than choosing baby names.

It's nice to have a Christmas tree. I think us having a baby soon is really the only reason we splurged on it. We're going to want to have some holiday joy already bought and in the house while we have a wee one and I'm on mat leave.

It's rather charming. Got my husband, my cats, my baby on the way in our cozy apartment and now we have a Christmas tree. It's so homey and typical. It's comforting. I had a lot of uproar when I was a teenager. I don't really value that sort of life. This is where it's at for me.