A Lot to be Thankful For!

With so much to be thankful for, we had a fantastic Thanksgiving weekend.  Georgia and Gary and William and his girlfriend Valerie came for a visit, and we all had a wonderful visit.  We cooked, fried turkeys, drank Bloody Mary's, watched Christmas Vacation (Gary and Valerie's first viewing), discussed the proper pronunciation of Pimento Cheese, watched football, and just had the best time being with everyone.

Clearly the first two picture were not taken by my ameteur iPhone.  William took these great shots.

This was the only picture that I could get of all three.  Clearly Luke was NOT in the mood to have his picture taken and is trying to escape.

 The Saturday after Thanksgiving we channeled our inner Griswold and went to a Christmas tree farm and cut down our own Christmas tree!  It was raining and cold, which added to the difficulty of cutting down an 8 ft tree with a hand saw.  James tried to help Brad, but the rest of us just supervised.

The tree farm is huge, and it's so pretty with all of the Christmas trees in perfect rows.  Mom didn't plan very well for the cold, so Luke got stuck wearing Natalie's jacket which just happened to be in the car.

Natalie and Luke LOVED decorating the tree, James not so much.  Natalie may love Christmas as much as I do.  We have two Christmas trees this year: the one we cut down is in our sitting room with all of our family ornaments.  The other tree is in our living room with all of the beautiful Christopher Radko ornaments and sentimental glass balls.

Funny story about this hand chopped tree: Brad and I put it in the stand crooked, and the tree was leaning so much that we had to prop it against the window for the night.  It took us three attempts to get it upright, so we have somewhat of a love/hate relationship with the tree at this point.  And it is VERY sappy!!  Little full, lotta sap. Looks great (Christmas Vacation reference).

James hanging his batman ornament

Natalie with her Ariel ornament 

Luke with his Mickey one, which is now broken

 He loves the tree, and walks up to it and says "No touch. No touch."

Well, this is my attempt to take my own Christmas card picture.  As I said above, it was raining and cold, and Luke was NOT having it.  Needless to say, we had Christmas card picture session round 2 the following day at church.