Christmas Planning

I know it's not even Thanksgiving yet, but I've started thinking about Christmas. I spent the morning sitting in a meeting listening to presentations on IT funding, so in an effort to stay awake I started making lists and plans.  

Christmas hasn't felt quite like Christmas the past few years around my house.  For various reasons, we haven't had a real tree and I haven't done the decorating and baking I've always done before.  These are the things that make it "feel"  like Christmas to me, so I'm determined that this year will be different.

We had hoped our son and his family would be able to come home for Christmas this year, but it looks like the Army is not going to cooperate.  Although I'm sure we'll see them sometime around the holiday, our daughter and her fiance are still trying to figure out whether they're spending the actual holiday with us or his parents so it's possible that it will be just Rob and myself on Christmas Day.  I'm o.k. with that though, it's always been the lead up to and the preparation for the holiday that I enjoy. 

So I'm going ahead with my plan.  First on the list is to haul all the ornaments and decorations into the house from the shed, and start sorting.  I gave the kids most of their ornaments a couple of years ago, but I want to do another good sort through and get rid of some older ornaments that were fillers but have no sentimental value.  Hopefully I'll get them all brought in on Sunday, and can spend a little time each evening next week sorting through.

Second is to start baking.  Several of my traditional goodies can be made ahead, at least to a certain point if not completely, and frozen.  So in the two weekends before Thanksgiving I'm going to get a few of those done.  We're going to some friends' house for Thanksgiving dinner, so I don't have to do too much cooking for that.  

Putting up a tree Thanksgiving weekend has always felt a little early to me. But I'll be traveling for work the week after that and not home until Saturday, so it would probably be the weekend after that before I could really do it, and that's only a week and a half before Christmas.  I want to enjoy it longer than that, and Thanksgiving is late this year, so it will really only be up 3 weeks before, and that sounds just right to me. Rob isn't in to Christmas decorating so much, and is planning to hunt all Thanksgiving weekend, but hopefully I can get him to help me get a tree in the house on Friday after Thanksgiving and I can spend Saturday and Sunday decorating.

So that's the general plan, and now I just need to make a list of what I'm baking and Christmas gift ideas.   Maybe I'll do that in next week's meeting.