Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!

As of yesterday afternoon, we had a mostly-undecorated Christmas tree sitting in our living room. Bruce had gone out and gotten it two weeks ago, and it's lovely, a blue spruce from North Carolina. We put lights on it fairly quickly, but have been putting off adding the other decorations. I've been working a lot, so I'm usually tired, and I had it in my head that it would be easier to decorate without Caetlin around to break stuff and generally get underfoot. When we put her to bed in the evenings or for a nap, if I didn't have to work, I wanted to just sit down. And stay seated. And then lately we haven't exactly been feeling the Christmas spirit anyway.

So the tree remained undecorated, looking a little sad in the corner of the living room as it quietly shed needles and was plugged in every so often. We even mulled some wine a few days ago, in anticipation of drinking it while decorating the tree, and the mulled wine sat in our refrigerator. It just hasn't been happening, for a variety of reasons, most of which I'm sure you can guess at fairly accurately.

Yesterday while Caetlin napped, I worked, and I managed to get all my work done for the day while she was down. I was so excited about having the evening free that I was up for it when Bruce said, "Hey, let's get the rest of the egg nog and decorate the tree with Caetlin this afternoon."

Caetlin, who is a girl after her mommy's own heart, will down a quart of (non-alcoholic, pasteurized) egg nog all by herself if we let her. We didn't have much left, but she drank her share and Mommy's share too. She's super cute when she asks for more because she pronounces egg nog very carefully: "More egggg nnoggg please." She was fascinated with a wooden Santa we have that I think ultimately didn't make it on the tree because she was playing with it. She played with the glass balls and the green and amber beads that we have, and she even put a couple on the tree with us. We have an inordinate number of birds for our tree, and she helped put a couple of those on as well.

We had Christmas carols playing on the TV, and cookies in the oven, and Bruce and I talked to Caetlin about Santa, and presents, and where our ornaments came from, and how glad we were to be decorating the tree together right then. Bruce made the comment that he had not felt like Christmas until that afternoon, and I wholeheartedly agreed with him. Maybe we weren't meant to decorate the tree sooner, because we needed a boost right then. Because we wouldn't have been able to feel that boost before Sunday afternoon, three days after finding out that one of us will be losing our job.

All I can say is that we loaded up the tree with all the cheap Target ornaments that we have, and the many that we have received from his parents, and the ones we have bought for each other. I tried to make sure the back of the tree wasn't neglected. Bruce worked to make sure Caetlin didn't break anything or get ahold of any hooks or anything that might hurt her. She was surprisingly very good about everything, and it wasn't onerous to watch her. And for a few minutes, I was able to stop worrying about our finances, about the job search for the laid off one, about the things from our lives before the job loss that I am grieving about losing. About the growing rift between myself and my family (will we ever speak again? Unclear at this point). About what we will do when Segunda comes. About work undone and finishing Christmas errands and everything else that has weighed us down for the last couple of weeks.

For a few minutes, we were able to be a family and be happy together, and our hearts were light. That might be the best Christmas present I could have received.