Oh, Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree...

Two Sundays ago, we rushed out to a local high school to purchase a Christmas tree.  (The high school sells them as a fundraiser for their boosters club.)

The boys are excited; they can hardly stand still.  They are solicitous to help Joseph carry it into the house and prop it up in the tree stand.

I start to rummage through the dusty boxes of all things Christmas stuff, looking for the tree lights.

Box #1.  Only two strands of lights.

Hmm...That's odd.  I thought we had four or five strands of lights for the tree.

I love the lights of the holiday season.  Outdoor icicle lights along the roofline.  Lighted snowmen and reindeer.  The neighbor has a lighted Christmas pig, geese, red birds, among other creatures in her front yard and I love it.  I like indoor lights draped over the mantel greens.  Moreover, I like lots and lots of lights on the Christmas tree to dispel the gloom of darkness that blankets everything by five o'clock.

I plug in the two measly strands of lights to double check they are in working order before we begin to circle the tree with them.  Half of each strand is out.  What good is a half strand of Christmas lights?  None.

This won't do.  Surely, I have more lights somewhere.  You can never have too many lights during Christmas.

Box #2. I poke around, hoping that more lights are shoved into the bowels of this sturdy plastic box with it's organized five layers of ornaments.

No such luck.  Sigh.

There will be no Christmas tree decorating this evening.  It's too late to run out to the nearest discount store to make a quick purchase.  Our bellies rumble for dinner.

The boys are disappointed and understandably so.  While I throw spaghetti together for supper, I let the boys choose a few ornaments to put on the tree anyway.  An act of appeasement for the savages.

For a week, the Christmas tree sits in a corner of our parlor--a foreboding dark green mass of gloom.  Sometimes, when walking through the house, I see its hulking mass out of the corner of my eye and mistake it for a giant house invader.

Even though I manage to find time to dash off to a discount store to purchase four boxes of multi-colored lights, we have no time to devote to actually decorating the tree.  School.  Work.  Homework. Dinner.  Baths.  Goodnight cartoon.  Good night reading.  Bed.  That's our evening routine.

I didn't want to decorate the tree by myself after the boys went to bed, although that thought crossed my mind more than once as each day of the week passed by.

I proclaimed the following Friday as the official tree decorating day.  By 4PM, everyone was home and eager to get started.

Que the Christmas music.  Elias and I drape two strands of lights on the bottom half of the tree.  I realized rather quickly that I should have bought six boxes of lights instead of just the four.  Four wasn't going to be enough.

Oh well.  We must forge ahead.  Four boxes of lights, (each strand twenty feet long) will have to suffice.

Joseph and I put the last two strands of lights on the top half of the tree.  The tree looks sparse--like we don't have enough and are stretching them out.  Making do.  I don't say anything.  The boys have already started putting ornaments on.

Where's the Star of Bethlehem?

It's not in box #1, nor in box #2.

Joseph produces a third box.  An unlabeled box that I hadn't noticed before.  Viola.  The Star of Bethlehem and four strands of lights packed neatly in box #3.  When I plug them in for a test, they light up perfectly.

Sigh.  Why didn't Joseph produce this box last Sunday since he was the only one who knew anything about it?  Sigh again.

I want to remove the few ornaments the boys have put on the tree and the four strands of lights already on the tree and start over.  Will have eight strands of lights on a six foot tree.  It will be glorious!

No.  Joseph insists that the four strands of lights already on the tree are fine.  Not too much.  Not too little.

I give in since this tree has been standing naked for a week in our parlor.

Elias is having fun, carefully considering where to put each ornament.  (He's so like his mother.  Yay!)

Ethan, on the other hand, has lost interest in this thing called Christmas tree decorating.  He's listing reasons why he should be allowed to handle the saw that Joseph used to cut the tip off the tree to make room for the Star of Bethlehem.

Joseph, Elias, and I carry on decorating the tree while Austen watches us with indifference.   Eventually, Ethan contents himself with one of his toy tools.  

Our humble Christmas tree. 

I carefully consider where to put each ornament, taking care to spread out the different color orbs so as not to have all the reds ones grouped together and all the blue ones grouped together, etc. I quietly circle behind and rearrange what other family members clump together all willy nilly.  Then it hits me.  I wonder if we should start a tradition of giving the boys their own ornaments to collect.

I still have ornaments from my childhood.  The one from Alaska my cousin Melanie gave me.  One my Aunt Jane gave me engraved with my name, among others.  My parents were careful to preserve these and pass them on to me.  Joseph, however, doesn't have any keepsake ornaments from his childhood.

So what do we do for our kids?  Keepsake ornaments or no?