Sucking up the Christmas Cheer- A "Tinsel"lating Tale

I have always wanted to have a real Christmas tree. My mom, on the other hand, always said they were a pain and a big mess, and I thought that was a rather Grinchy idea, and I decided that when I had a home of my own, I would have a real Christmas tree. I have also always loved tinsel. My mom let us put those tinsel "icecicles" on our tree one year, but she never let us do it again. This also seemed rather grinchy to me, so this year, I asked Arthur if we could have a real tree, and I went to Wal-Mart and bought a nice big package of tinsel. Saturday afternoon, after he finished duck hunting (they brought back 16 ducks), Arthur took me to a Christmas tree farm to pick out a tree. It was great! There was a Santa guy there (that Ho-ho guy, as my cousin's little boy used to say) who told kids to be good because Jesus wanted them to love everyone and be nice to people. There was also FREE hot chocolate! I could NEVER pass up free hot chocolate! Anyways, we found the perfect tree, and Arthur sawed it down.
Here is Arthur posing with the tree. He is making sure everyone sees how I am torturing him by dragging him there :-)
Here I am with our tree. My wonderful hubby sawing down our tree.
We invited Bob, Shar, Elise, and Bob and Shar's two foster kids over to help decorate the tree. Well, the guys watched the football game, and the rest of us decorated. They had a great time. There were a few branches that were a bit weighed down with ornaments, but overall, they did a good job of spreading them out. Also, I don't have a tree topper yet, so we put a little teddy bear on top for now. I ended up getting some more of that snowflake garland too, so it looks a little better now than it did in the pictures. Arthur popped some popcorn, and Shar brought oreos, so we had some great snack food. The kids, especially boy B., loved the popcorn popper! Shar, Elise, and I played some Candy Land with the kiddos. They were sad when it was time to go home (maybe just because they knew it would be bedtime when they got there), but we did all have a good time!
What I discovered while decorating is that tinsel is a very messy thing, which is probably why my mom wasn't that into tinsel, but it is a wonderful little bit of Christmas cheer, and I love seeing it on my tree, so I was not concerned about the mess. (I would recommend to anyone contemplating using tinsel on their tree that you do NOT wear a nice staticky sweater. My nice staticky sweater made sure I was nice and tinsely)! Between wrestling the tree into the house and into the tree stand and all the decorating, there was a LOT of stuff on my carpet. However, I had the utmost confidence that my vacuum cleaner could handle it. My Bissell vaccuum cleaner will pick up anything, and I'd recommend it to anyone wanting a good vaccuum for a reasonable price. So, I whipped it out and proceeded to clean! It did a great job of picking up the tinsel and pine needles. However, when I swept under the tree, it did a great job of sucking all of the tinsel off of the lower branches as well! It looked very interesting with loads of tinsel on the higher branches and none at all on the lower couple of layers of branches. I searched around the house for loose tinsel on the floor (it did not contain itself to the living room... it roamed freely around the house as if it were all open range) and swiped some from the back of the tree to balance it back out a bit. I guess I should wait until we take the tree down after Christmas to vaccuum directly under the tree, or I will run out of my bits of Christmas cheer before I even finish buying all of the presents! Maybe my mom was not Grinchy, just a bit more practical than my romanticized ideas of Christmas allow me to be. :-) Even with the mess though, I think I will always love tinsel. I might have gotten carried away playing with the different effects on my camera, but I think you can see the tinsel better on the sepia picture.
I also finished my stockings! Yey! I think they turned out really cute. I bought some cross-stitch tread and plan on sewing our names onto them. I do not cross-stitch, but I like stitching the names with that thread as opposed to the single strand embroidery thread. They were really easy to make. I love iron on paper! I just cut the shapes out of felt and ironed them onto the fabric. The actual stocking fabric is felt also, but I got it off of a large bolt, whereas the decorations are cut from smaller squares of felt from the craft section. I stitched the two sides of the stockings together with a long running stitch using cross stitching thread. I stitched two ribbons together for the border at the top and ironed it around the top border of the stocking. I folded over a small piece of ribbon and tacked it down to the inside corner of the stockings and voila! Today, Shar and I made about 200 sugar cookies. That was fun. She is taking them to her teen Bible club tonight. They will get to decorate them and package them to deliver to people in the community. I may have to stop by during kids' club and take a few pictures. In case you're curious, it takes 15 cups of flour and 6 sticks of margarine to make that many cookies. :-) It also takes 3 cups of powdered sugar and about 4 cups of granulated sugar. That ought to spread some Christmas cheer, even without the tinsel!

Thanksgiving Chaos!

We've been busy lately. Arthur is working in Illinois, which means that he leaves here before 5AM and doesn't get home until about 5:30 PM. :-( That has seriously restricted the time available for us to do ANYTHING! It's dark when he leaves and dark when he gets home, and since we get up so early, we don't want to be out too late, so we don't get out much. I know, I said we've been busy, and so far, this post makes it sound like we haven't been doing anything, but we have! Thanksgiving day, Arthur got up at 3AM and went duck hunting. It was SNOWING when he left! Yey! When he got home, he had to go put straw on his mom's outdoor plants. (She was gone to Minnesota to be with the Baber family for Thanksgiving). Meanwhile, I baked cinnamon rolls and cooked some green beans to take to my cousin Shar's house, where we had our Thanksgiving meal. Thanks, Shar! I also made a stocking. I still need to make one more, and when they're done, I'll post a picture here. I wanted something cute and creative for our stockings, so I decided to make our own.

Arthur had to get up and go back to work on Friday, and I left the house shortly after he did to go Christmas shopping, so by the time he got home from work, we were both VERY tired. While he was gone, I packed up to get ready to go to Oklahoma for Thanksgiving, and we left as soon as he got home and got the car started (which was acting up AGAIN). Before a previous trip to Oklahoma, my car refused to start. Arthur replaced a battery (as my dad recommended), unreplaced the battery as he had got the wrong one, replaced it again, unreplaced it again since that turned out not to be the problem, and several phone calls to my dad and two trips to O'Reilly's auto parts later, replaced the starter, which seemed to fix the car. We made a trip to OK after that, and the car started acting up again. My dad said it was probably a fuse problem. He also said one of the belts needed replaced. My car is falling apart! When we got home Arthur said I should not drive the car until he could replace the belt and the fuse. If the fuse acted up, the car could refuse to start, stranding me, and if the belt broke, it could overheat, stranding me, so I have been busily driving over curbs in Arthur's truck while he drives the old beater he bought to get him better gas mileage to and from work.

Anyways, back to Friday afternoon. Arthur had got off a little early, because the whole crew wanted to be with family for the holiday weekend. He went to pull the car around to load it, and it wouldn't start! He had bought fuses so as to be ready the next time the fuse blew (they think a wire or something keeps hitting it). He put the new fuse in, but realized he'd got the wrong size. (We hate dodges. Nothing is standard)! Our neighbor drove up about that time, and he happened to have a fuse in his truck that fit, so we borrowed that, loaded up the car, and got on the road about 4:30. When we got almost to Nowata, OK, roughly an hour from home, it was snowing a LOT. The road was warm enough that it wasn't particularly slick except on the bridges, which are many around there, but the snow was falling so fast that visibility was only about 10-15 feet. Long story short, we were going 30 in a 65, even with no other cars on the road, which, if you know my husband, is NOT normal procedure for us! As we turned toward Oglesby, the snow lightened up, and we were able to resume a relatively normal speed. We got home around 11 or so.

Saturday morning, Arthur and my dad went to winterize one of our rent houses we recently purchased in Ochelata. They are trailer houses. Arthur fixed one of them enough to be liveable, and we got it rented the same day we finished cleaning it up! The other one will require a lot more work! After winterizing it, they worked on my car, replacing two belts, I think. After a scrumptious dinner at my Grandma Jane's, the guys (Arthur, Uncle Tony, my cousins' husbands John and Dustin, and my brother Justin) went to Mom and Dad's house to play paintball. We ate again at Grandma's that evening, and then Mom, Uncle Tony, and I went to see my Grandpa Don in the hospital in Tulsa (more on that another time). We got home kind of late, and Justin, Arthur, and Sami'O we playing Justin's Wii. Mom and I joined in, and I won a game of bowling! I tried boxing later, and Justin made fun of me! :-P

Sunday morning, we went to church in Ochelata, had dinner at Grandma's with my family and Uncle Tony and Aunt Shug, then packed up and headed home. End of story? Not quite! We were almost to Oglesby, when Arthur was going around a curve and nearly didn't make it. I looked at the spedometer and saw that he was only going about 35, not nearly fast enough to have that much trouble turning a corner. We heard something hit the bottom of the car and the ground, but I thought it was probably gravel from skidding around the corner so hard. Arthur said, "What just happened?" He decided that the power steering had gone out. The fluid had been low before, so we thought maybe the power steering fluid had leaked out. We stopped at a gas station and got some, but when he started to refill the fluid, he saw it was full! He got back in the car and tried to start it. It didn't turn over, so he replaced yet another fuse and tried again. This time, it started, but it was so hard to drive on the curvy road that we stopped again and called my dad. He told Arthur to check the belt, and sure enough, it was GONE! We drove all the way back to Missouri, on those curvy country roads, with no power steering. VERY irritating! So, I am still running over curbs in the really long truck.

The wonderful world of blogging!

Hi, everyone. I have succumbed to the trend of blogging! AHHHH! I enjoy reading the blogs of friends and family, and a few have suggested that I should start my own, so here it is! There's not much to look at now, but I hope to get things up and running soon. I would have liked something a little more dramatic and exciting for a first post, but this is what you get! I would like to post some pictures of our wedding soon, so be ready!