Decorated For The Holidays.

Yesterday I went and got my Covid shot and then picked up Dad and brought him home for the day. Chad and Cindy got up early and went and braved the Black Friday shopping crowds in Butte.

When everyone got home we started decorating Mom and Dads house for the holidays. Chad and Cindy are amazing in how they just whip everything together. We got two trees up and the boys started decorating them Cindy, Chad and I worked on getting lights and garland up on the windows. Cindy then worked on getting various decorations put up around the house.

Colleen did some much needed work on my Mom and Dads Christmas card mailing list and got labels printed up for them. That will give us a project to work on once Dad gets home.

The boys were comical as they were putting the decorations up on the trees. Heath had Christmas music playing on his phone and they were singing away as they put the decorations on the tree. It was cute as hell. Did Uncle Joe think to get any pictures or video. No.

Then the Galbavy's took off in two directions. Chad took his Mom back to Missoula and Cindy and the boys went to Helena.

Colleen just took off for Denver this morning. I just pray she has a safe trip. I am afraid she is going to have some icy roads to contend with from Homestack pass on through Wyoming. It is 6 above zero here in Elk Park this morning and it is pretty foggy.

I had a few tough moments yesterday. I had shipped some of Jennifer's winter clothes up here yesterday for my sisters to look at. Fortunately, they were able to divvy all of them up between the two of them. While I am grateful they could use them, it was just tough and I did break into tears while we were going through them. However I am glad they are going to put the clothes to use, especially some nice sorrel boots that I think Jennifer only wore one or two times. Cindy is going to be able to use those. They are not the prettiest of boots but they are nice ones that should keep her feet warm.

While we were decorating I had a few flashbacks. Jennifer and I over the years got more and more lax on decorating our house. It just was not worth the effort. We all most always left for the holiday, so dragging all that stuff out and then leaving just did not make any sense to us. We had tons of Christmas decorations that we lugged around the country for years. Jennifer had amassed a bunch of Snow Village ceramic buildings over the years. Most of these were gifts from family. When we moved from San Antonio to Mesquite we thinned them down to just a few pieces that were special to her. At the end we usually just put up tree and we put some lights on it we did not even put any decorations on it. Jennifer did like the lights, but neither of us had a big desire to put all the bulbs and garland etc on it.

I also laughed when I remembered our first Christmas in Midland Texas. When we moved into the house we had made the mistake of storing our Christmas decorations up in the attic of our garage. When we moved it was still fairly cool and the house did not have a ton of storage space so it was just the logical spot to store the stuff, that is until we went to unbox them for Christmas (at that point we were still decorating). When we got the boxes down we found that anything made of wax did not make it. The 100+ degrees temps were not kind to wax and or plastic. We had a bunch of Christmas candles and decorations that had melted into a big glob. It would have made a interesting art piece, but needless to say it thinned down some of the decorations that we had.

Of course over the years, we replenished some of that stuff, just to get rid of it in the end. Anyway it was overall a good day, just a couple of tough moments.