Happy December!

Yes, it's finally here! December has arrived and the countdown to Christmas has well and truly started. My girls were certainly happy to open the first door on their advent calendars today. As for me, I have, overnight, turned into the biggest kid in the world! Well, I say overnight, in truth it was on the school run. Oh how I love James and Becky of Heart Kent's Breakfast Show. This fab pair had me singing away to Christmas songs on school run this morning, whilst Miss. L looked at me like I'd gone totally crazy. Roll on 8.30am and 'The Sleeps 'til Santa' song and that was it, I was in my Christmassy element!

We got a bit of a head start on the trees yesterday, but not before Miss. L and I had made a trip to Homebase to get a new tree for the playroom. The one we had previously (for the past twelve years) was a nightmare, you only had to look at it a bit 'funny' and it would topple over, and you most certainly did not want to breathe near it, because that was a guaranteed topple. I really couldn't face another December of picking the tree up again, hence we needed a new one. Miss. L chose it and then insisted on carrying it around the store in it's fairly large box. I'm sure the staff probably thought I was a terrible mother, but she was a happy girl with her tree.

When we got back home I started putting the tree together; thankfully, Dr. BD had popped round and proved to be very helpful, especially since I had managed to put the middle section of the tree at the bottom. After he had pointed out my error, we sorted it quite quickly, only to find the middle wouldn't slot into the bottom as the tubing was a little squashed. Dr. BD came to the rescue and soon we were back on track. I'd only intended to get the tree up and put the lights on ready for the girls to decorate today, but they really wanted to do the whole lot yesterday evening and there wasn't any harm in letting them crack on with it. As it was, Miss. D had revision to do, so Miss. L ended up decorating the tree alone, and she did a pretty good job!

Today, was the turn of our main tree, in the living room. As I have mentioned in previous posts, this tree has been sat in my kitchen, in it's box by the back door since last Christmas, so I was pleased to finally get it out of there. That said, the box is huge (well, it is if you're somewhat vertically challenged, as I am) and I did struggle getting it up the stairs into the living room, but I eventually managed and set about the arduous task of assembling the tree.

This tree, takes forever to piece together. All the branches have to be individually inserted into the correct hole then spread out to look 'realistic'. Once upon a time this was easy, but after 13 years the colour coding has faded and most of the letter coding has gone completely.

However, this year, was actually easier than previous years. and the whole process of assembling and putting on the lights only took around an hour.

At this point I decided to pop the kettle on and have a cuppa. The serious decorating was an after school job and that is just what Miss. L and I did. I must say, she really is getting rather good at tree decorating.

So that's us all done, at least so far as trees are concerned. I had hoped to get everything done by the end of November, but we do still have a few more presents to get and wrap, that's okay though, it won't take too long to finish. Now the fun begins, kicking off with Christmas lunch at school on Monday and I cannot wait!