Deck the halls

I always do at least a little Black Friday shopping. It's a tradition. I went to 2 stores this year...one on Thursday night and one on Friday, mid morning. I got a few things for good deals, and I have to say that my experience has been that the majority of people are polite and friendly on Black Friday. I have seen the crazy stampedes and other injuries that occur in some places, and I'm sure there are rude people here too. But I have been fortunate to primarily see people be polite and fairly helpful to one another.

The other tradition for the day after Thanksgiving is to pull out our holiday decorations and decorate for Christmas. I love decorating! I love Christmas! So I love this. Alfredo and I decided that this year we are going to get a live tree for upstairs. We have never had a live tree in 11 1/2 years of marriage. We have 2 fake trees and neither is particularly pretty. So we are going to get a real tree. But we're going to wait at least another week before we buy it, so we just decorated the tree down stairs and the other decorations this weekend. We generally have one tree upstairs that the kids get to decorate with matching ornaments, and then Alfredo waits until they are done and moves the ornaments around to make it look perfect. Then we have one downstairs with a huge assortment of random ornaments that they get to decorate however they want. Michelle does a pretty good job of getting ornaments spread fairly evenly around the tree and does a little bossing of her sisters to make sure it isn't too bottom heavy or only decorated in the front and not the back. She takes after her dad in that way. She likes things neat and orderly. So the girls decorated the downstairs tree and we'll get the live tree soon. I'm kind of excited. As a little girl, we always got a live tree and I prefer them. I don't think we will make a habit of getting a live tree, but I'm excited to do it this year.