Our Trees Are Up!

I realize they look like they are on fire...but for some reason I like these poor quality pics from my cell phone! I love decorating early...it seems like if we don't get it done the day after Thanksgiving it just isn't up long enough to really enjoy it! It's not like we are elaborate decorators anyway...just one tall tree in all silver with white lights and then a small tree with colored lights for the girls. This years decorating went so much better than it did last year. Let me recap last year's experience:
It was Friday evening and the mood was set....Christmas music playing, fireplace lit, kettle of water boiling for hot cocoa....etc. So, Jerry set out to get the boxes of Christmas decorations/trees/stockings/wreaths..the works! He climbed into the upstairs attic...hmm...no xmas boxes there, so he climbed into the garage attic...hmm...no xmas boxes there either. So he figures he must have put them in our storage building out back. Jerry gets the keys and heads out there a little frustrated at this point. When he returned and told me that he couldn't find our xmas boxes out there either, I thought he was kidding! We had just moved in to this house in July, so the wheels in our heads started turning. We had moved out of our E. Dallas home in May....and stored our things in various places...while we lived with family and house hunted. Could we have left the boxes in one of our two storage buildings? Did we forget some of the things we stored at Jerry's parent's home? Or, did we never move them from our old house at all!?!? At this point we were worried! When you think of your Christmas things, so many of them are irreplaceable...our first Christmas ornament (which still doesn't have a photo in it 9 Christmases later)...okay so maybe that isn't so special, but Lily's first baby ornaments, precious antique ones, the stocking Jerry's grandmother knitted him when he was a boy, and countless other treasures...were they all gone? We were on the phone immediately...first to our family to see if we had left these items stored with them, then to the people to helped us move to see if they had any recollection of getting things from the attic...and finally to our realtor so we could get in touch with the new owners of our old house. We spent an entire weekend not knowing the fate of our special Christmas things. Then finally we were in touch with the new owner...he had noticed all of the boxes in the attic shortly after moving in, but somehow couldn't get in touch with us...huh? our realtor had our cell phone numbers....oh well! We were just so thankful that he hadn't thrown them out or something...he figured we would track those boxes down eventually! Looking back, our panic seems silly...especially when considering the true meaning of Christmas...Thank You, Jesus, for being born and giving us reason to celebrate...YOU are our true treasure!