It took me much longer than usual to get into the Christmas spirit this year, so most of our holiday festivities were slightly more thrown together than normal!
We kept missing available windows to go and get a tree, so we finally headed out on a Monday in the middle of December (we usually go the weekend after Thanksgiving). It ended up being a slightly disheartening trip, with the factors of...
- Arriving at the tree farm to a steady drizzle that began and continued through the entire process of huddling under larger trees to scope out the one we wanted, and kneeling in mud to saw it down.
- Finding out that the farm cat that normally follows us around each year while we get our tree (and ends up in our picture) had died during this past year.
- Stopping at a Mom & Pop ice cream shop that we love on our way home, to be greeted by a man selling tacky Christmas decorations in a torn apart shell of the building, informing us that the diner had closed, and that the structure was getting torn down after Christmas to build a Sheetz.
We had a wonderfully relaxing Christmas Day with my dad, with the opportunity to watch the amazingly powerful film "Joyeux Noel" again - about the Christmas Day truce of 1914 in the midst of trench warfare of WWI. A must-see Christmas movie in our books!
For the next several days, we hosted Chad's parents, sister, and niece (unfortunately, our brother-in-law couldn't make it due to his work schedule). It was great to have reconnecting time with them, and entirely ironic for the non-shopping Oberholtzers to take a family picture in the Nittany Mall (where we headed one evening to let 2-year old Lydia run off some energy).
We very much enjoyed being home with people we love for several days, focusing on cooking, doing dishes, and other entirely domestic tasks!
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
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