Evolving Traditions, part 2

Remember when I was talking about holiday traditions evolving? Yup. Just keeps happening. Primarily, for instance, here's our tree this year...

Let me back up...

So, a couple weekends ago, Nathan, Micah and I went to get our tree...

We went to the same tree farm we've been going to for years. Unfortunately, we left it a bit long and the year isn't the best for trees here after all the wildfires recently. We found a tree or two that would work but they didn't excite us at all and were about twice as expensive as last year. Given the lack of enthusiasm, we ultimately left the lot without a tree. Sad. Instead, we made a plan to hang lights on our climbing wall. That decided, we spent the rest of the day hanging outside lights and putting up our inflatables...

(Two days later, we brought all those inflatables back inside preventatively due to the high winds forecast for last Wednesday. ;P Fortunately, our little section of town didn't get slammed by the heavy winds that other areas got, and we've since put everything back out. Of course, as I type, I can hear the wind gusting outside again. Oy.)

As I mentioned, all boys are now home so this past weekend we executed our climbing wall tree plan, baked a LOT of cookies (found a yummy new recipe for eggnog cookies), and put up the rest of our indoor decorations.

We're strangely happy with our climbing wall tree, though it did make for many fewer ornaments this year. Perhaps we'll evolve this in coming years to add more strings of lights so that we can put up more ornaments? Who knows?