Among the things that Wesley does with great enthusiasm is resisting bedtime. He screams, throws things, bangs on the wall, cries, begs, pleads and even promises to poop in the toilet. He hates going to bed. He likes eating his milk and banana. He likes reading books. He likes hearing the stories we make up. He just doesn’t like actually going to bed. It is a traumatic experience almost every night and almost every night it makes Amber and I feel like terrible parents.
Call me old fashioned, but I when I hear “tree lighting” I think of a tree (preferably a large evergreen of some kind) with lights on it (preferably in strands that wrap around the tree branches). It probably stems from growing up in Sedro-Woolley which has forever placed a large tree in the center of a downtown intersection during the holidays. The tree becomes the center of much conversation in town. The talk goes splits pretty cleanly into two groups: 1) “Have you seen that tree? That is the sadest tree we’ve ever had.” and 2) “Have you seen that tree? That is the nicest tree we’ve ever had.”. Nothing in the middle. It is either awful or wonderful. Either way it is a real tree and special. I remember the year they placed the tree in a corner lot rather than in the center of the intersection. I don’t think they’ll do that again.
Tags: Austin, Christmas, christmas tree, lighting, texas, Zilker
Wells Branch, the neighborhood we live in, does a lot of community events. They have potlucks and concerts and fishing derbies. We haven’t done any of those. We talked about them, but just never really went. They do a couple of very nice things celebrating Christmas. Namely that they put Santa in the Wells Branch Homestead (circa 1885) and placed what must have been many hundreds of luminaries around the trails in Katherine Fleischer park. The events lasted two days and also included a community potluck and live Christmas music.
For Wesley and Jillian both this was their first trip to see Santa. Wesley and I have been talking about Santa on some recent runs. He has been getting really interested in stories and has been asking me to tell him has many as I can remember. During the runs I default to the easiest ones I can think of. This time of year they are a little Santa and Rudolph heavy. I wasn’t sure how he would do. He is a little timid around strangers and can really get upset at things you wouldn’t expect. Jillian of course would be a total crap shoot. She’d either be in a good mood or not and there wasn’t any predicting or changing it. After waiting a reasonable amount of time (I’m glad we got there early) we had our moment with the big man. I would say he was a very high quality santa. The small room with low ceilings and dominating fireplace was the perfect setting. If it weren’t 75 degrees outside and 90 inside the cabin it might have felt like the north pole. Wesley was timid, but smiled in the pictures and was patient enough. Jillian was just Jillian and so all went well. We took a bunch of photos with our camera, bought one Polaroid for $2 (surprisingly reasonable) and headed outside.
Tags: Amber, Austin, Christmas, Homestead, Jillian, Santa, texas, Wells Branch, Wesley
Friday afternoon we headed out to hunt down our Christmas tree. I knew we were in for something different than what we were used to in Washington. Back home we have a lot of tree farms fairly close by, the trees look just like they do on the Christmas cards (firs mostly, but with lots of other species as well). Down here mostly you have Pine. Pine are a good tree. Nothing against them. I’m sure they are great for something. Unfortunately they don’t make a terribly great Christmas tree. As an example look at this tree:
Tags: Christmas, christmas tree, tree, Wesley