Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree...

There is a Christmas tree in our living room. It's a ridiculously modest tree, bought with some money that was given to us for our wedding by my cousin, Al and his wife Lindsey. It was important to us that we use it to buy something that would be with us for awhile, so we bought our first family Christmas tree with it. Good decision, 'cause we think of Al and Linds each and every year we put it up. It doesn't look like much, but it means a lot to us.

Zoey was excited...correction...SO excited, to help get Christmas rolling around here. She bounced around the living room while we assembled the tree. She dove into the decorations box and started chucking paper cranes all over the place, although mostly in one isolated spot on the tree. She did her best to help put lights on the branches she could reach, which meant mostly just dumping entire clumps of light strands on single branches...still wrapped in their twist-ties. She was all smiles and trembling hands. It was kinda breathtaking to watch. We so easily forget the overwhelming idea that Christmas is to a child.

We tried to take video...didn't work. We tried to snap a few photos...they looked awful. Mostly we just tried to remember it all. This, Zoey's second Christmas, will most certainly feel like her very first. She is old enough to know what's happening, and wide eyed enough to make us all feel small. I get kinda choked up thinking about it. She's got a lot of Christmas' ahead of her. We've got a lot of remembering to prepare ourselves for.

I try to remind myself that I need to be fully in each moment, watching and contributing...helping the holiday revolve around her, at least for as long as it can. It won't be long and we'll beat her out of bed in the morning, and she won't be so eager to dive into the box of decorations. She won't lose her mind when she sees her Christmas lights outside, and she'll probably have to work at the mall on Christmas Eve. So we're watching... and June's snapping pics, and I'm trying to scribble as much down as I can, but we know it's no use. Parents better than us have failed at the same task. It's the shared experience of this complex thing we're all doing, parenting, I mean, that we're doomed to forget, to take for granted, to lose perspective, but we duke it out with time and memory regardless. It's our right to try.

Our Christmas tree is up, and right now a little girl is bouncing around the house like it's the first day of the rest of her life...in a painfully heart filling, incomprehensible way, it is. Now I have to stop writing because I keep mistyping through these very unmanly tears.