A Beat Down and a Christmas Tree

Yesterday was one of those days where I just felt beat down.  Beat down from ALL sides - from my personal life, from my professional life, from random mean blog commenters...  It was one of those days where you just have to laugh out loud at some point and say,  Really?  Really?  The universe wants to pile on something else? 

I had the urge to assume fetal position and tuck my head down to keep all the spears from hitting me.  Kind of like this:

That's a pangolin, by the way.  Taken from http://wisecreatures.blogspot.com/2010/07/tale-of-tails.html

It was just one of those days where I felt defeated. 

Around 6pm I was sitting with the kids at dinner (for icing on the cake, hubby was working late), and brainstorming what I could do to turn this funk around.  And then, the inspiration came: 

CHRISTMAS!

Okay, so I'm not one that is always super into the holiday spirit.  We don't decorate our house, or put up lights, or play Christmas music.  Oh yeah, and we are Jewish (Well, kind of. It's complicated.).  But we DO celebrate Christmas every year - with Santa, the tree, the presents, the stockings, and all. 

I guess it's the memories of Christmases from my youth, but decorating a fresh smelling Christmas tree just makes me happy.  I take it seriously, and I'm very particular about our ornament choices.  Each ornament has to have meaning - aka, either an ornament I remember from my childhood, or an ornament we bought in Disney World, or in California, or wine tasting, or in honor of the kids' births, etc.  It's not always pretty, and it's not always coordinated, but our tree is us, and it is decorated by our memories.  It makes decorating the tree a bittersweet, nostalgic, experience.  

We bought and decorated our Christmas tree on Sunday, but we hadn't bought any lights for it.  We'd actually never done lights on our own tree before.  And what a travesty!  So, at 6:30pm last night, that was it.  Kids! I announced, We're going to buy Christmas lights and light up our tree!

And so we did. 

And I was instantly in a good mood.

The kids were into helping me put the lights on for about a half second and then went on to other things.  It was probably comical to watch me contort and curve and curse as I wrapped the tree (and got sap all over my hands), but I did it.  And when I turned on the lights, it looked like this: 

It's not the most beautiful Christmas tree in the world, but it's ours and I love it.

Yay for the holiday season!