A thrill of hope; the weary world rejoices

For the past eleven years, since Dave and I have been married, I've been carefully cultivating a little Christmas ornament collection. It's a mish-mash of ornaments people have given me and ornaments I've bought at half price after Christmas every year (come on, you KNOW me). I've amassed nice variety of fun objects, ranging from lollipops and cats and dogs, to incredibly intricate sailboats, to a chicken water jug. My Empire State Building got crushed last year, which was highly disappointing. But, as I've told the kids, "The first rule of ornaments is that ornaments break." (It's kind of like Fight Club, except you can talk about the ornaments.) "If an ornament breaks, we'll be sad about it, and then we'll clean it up, and then we'll find another ornament to love."

Each year since the kids have been around, they've helped us as much as they can manage or understand but it hasn't been a fully coordinated family effort. This year was different.

This year we finally experienced - together - the full-on joy of opening the box, re-discovering our old favorites, deciding which ones we want where, and hanging them up together. Zach is finally old enough to "get" the concept of choosing an ornament and hanging it on the tree (as opposed to taking all of the ball ornaments and running off with them). Luke is old enough to remember the ornaments he made in past years and have fond memories of bringing them home.

When we were finished, we turned off all of the lights except for the ones on the tree and sat there marveling at our glorious handiwork. "This was a very nice Christmas," declared Zach.

Of course, there is an awkwardly large cluster of ornaments right at the front of the tree at the bottom. Am I going to move them? Nope.