A Quest Completed

Hey look! It's the third week in Advent and the beginning of Hannukah! Because we can never have enough winter festivals that involve lighting things on fire ... we need to borrow some from other religions. (Next: The Yule Log).

OK, honestly, we don't celebrate Hannukah. But the kids learned about it in school and we did have this very nice menorah, and through a process too completed to explain right now I came into possession of some dreidls, so ... we decided to learn a little bit about it this weekend. We even spun the dreidl and played the game.

Meanwhile, back on the Nativity shelf ... it's getting crowded. Everybody's standing around as if they're expecting something to happen ... which, of course, is the whole point of Advent.

This has been a very Christmassy weekend so far. We did a Christmas-themed Children's Church program today, which as always involved a lot of preparation and work but was enjoyed by all, which makes it worth doing. This afternoon we were supposed to go carolling but got rained out -- our spirits may be Christmassy but the weather is not at all. This evening Jason and I took the kids on their annual Christmas shopping trip, where we split up into teams (boys vs girls) and power-shop for each other for about an hour, then meet up for hot chocolate at (where else?) Starbucks afterwards.

Following that, we went on a quest to find two trees -- inside and outside -- in the dark. With $20 in my back pocket. My need to pay no more than $10 for a fresh-cut Christmas tree has gone from being a preference to being a full-blown obsession. This year the cheap lots were harder to find and we drove around in the dark for some time while Jason (bless him for putting up with such a cheapskate for a wife) tried to gently talk me into the possibility that we might have to spent up to $15 for a tree.

Then I saw it ... the magical sign, spray-painted by hand on a piece of plywood in someone's front yard on Blackmarsh Road: "TREES $10." My joy knew no bounds. (It was actually a place we'd bought from in the past, and if we'd remembered it sooner we would have saved a lot of driving around.) After a gruelling two minutes spent selecting the perfect trees (I'm not picky, just cheap) Jason lashed them to the top of the van and we drove home, where he is even now stringing lights on the indoor tree while the children nestle all snug in their beds, looking forward to getting up and decorating the tree tomorrow.