So what’s everyone doin’ for Christmas?

We had a beautiful candlelight Christmas music concert and caroling thing at church last night. The stage was lit with these beautiful wax LED candles that look totally real with flickering "flames" and everything, but the insides of the candles slowly change colors. I had them all set to change randomly at different timing from each other so it was really pretty. The audience also held small LED candles whose color changed randomly throughout the service. It was so pretty!!! My husband played his violin accompanied by the church pianist who is amazing. I read the history of each song before we sang/listened to it, which really added a lot of deeper meaning to the evening. It was a lot of fun.

Tomorrow night we're doing a Christmas caroling hayride with hot chocolate afterwards. Thursday night our church is having "A Cowboy Christmas Eve" service. Sometime this week we may get our goats and wagon out and decorate them all up and do some kind of little "Christmas parade" by ourselves at the golf course. If we do that, I'll dress in my elf costume and take the reins and my husband will go in his Santa suit and we'll just wave at the houses. We'll see if we get ambitious enough to do that!

On Christmas day my husband and I will at home by ourselves as usual, which is the way we like it. We've been invited to Christmas dinner at a neighbor's house and we'll probably go to that for a couple of hours, but otherwise we'll just enjoy relaxing at home.

We have a fantastic tree this year. We always cut a fir tree from our own property. We have a north-facing slope that I like to call our "Christmas tree farm" because it's covered in small-ish firs (although they keep getting bigger!). We've cut one from that slope every Christmas, but this year we were a little nervous. The terrible drought last summer and fall dried them out so many of them don't look very good this year. They're still alive (and I don't think we'll lose any--firs are very hardy!), but they just look faded, dried-out, and have patches where the needles are brown. But there was this one that looked full, green, and healthy, and it was just the right height. When I looked closer I realized that about four feet up it was cut off. So this was a tree we must have cut down years ago on one of our first Christmases on this property! (We moved here in 2011.) The branches under the part we cut had bent themselves upwards toward the sun and kept growing, and it was a very full, healthy tree! I almost hated to cut it down again but at the same time I figure it must be a pretty big honor for a tree to get chosen for more than one Christmas! It's almost a double tree and it looks spectacular. I happen to love asymmetrical trees and this one definitely fits the bill!

And up goes the tree. This is the easy part. It will be hard taking it down in a week and a half.