oh, christmas tree

It was an especially cold day so we thought it would be fun to go by a local pastry shop to get some hot cocoa and then go pick out a Christmas tree. Doesn't that just sound like a quaint family movie? Emmy, however, doesn't respond to sugar bribes yet and she had two meltdowns before we left the house so we decided to make the trip as fast as possible and cut out the cocoa. 

 
Emmy also recently graduated to the "wait for no-one stage" where she runs off in the direction of whatever her heart desires. Everyone says she's so cute, giggling and laughing down the aisles. They aren't the ones chasing her. 

We always go to Home Depot for our trees. My brother-in-law is kind of  a connoisseur of Christmas trees and converted me and my sister from fake trees to real ones. He recommended Home Depot for price, quality and service and they have always been amazing for us. Their employees are cheerful and our trees last over a month and are beautiful.

Emmy didn't like them climbing all over our car to get the tree secure. The two guys who helped us tried to make her laugh but it didn't work. 

When we got home we searched all over the house and couldn't find any lights. I vaguely remembered tossing all of them out last year because so many had burned out. Joe wasn't thrilled but he went back to Home Depot.

While he was gone, I pulled out the box of ornaments and Emmy immediately smashed 2 of them. If I looked away for one second, she had her sticky fingers on something fragile. It's like the Christmas tree turned her into a naughty little gnome; sneaking ornaments and throwing them on the ground as hard as possible then running off giggling. I made her some hot chocolate and she chugged it, downing that full cup of sugar in 5 seconds. 
Joe got home with the lights only to realize that we had totally underestimated the size of our tree. He bought 700 lights but headed back out to Home Depot for 600 more. I wanted to mix colored lights and white lights and you know, you can't just mix in any box of colored lights - they have to be consistent. Home Depot was sold out of the exact lights he had just bought. So, he headed to target, carrying a picture of the correct box with him and possibly grumbling a bit but definitely not offering to stay with Emmy.  
Emmy's sugar wore off by 6 and after an epic whine/sobfest, I took her to bed.  Even though we knew she would wake up at night starved and hangry, we let her sleep so we could get this d*mn tree finished. I'm not sure that anyone really enjoys putting up their tree, it's a lot of work and it's dusty and prickly and sappy. 

Like how evenly the colored lights and white lights are mixed? Yeah, we really needed another strand of white but this was just going to have to suffice.  

Still, look at how good all these pictures came out and you know, we definitely made memories that we can laugh about later. And every morning when Emmy wakes up she runs straight to the tree to ooh and aww over the lights.   Yeah, she usually promptly hulk smashes an ornament but hey, I put all of my favorites on the top and everyone in the Henson house is happy.