It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Anyone else have a scrooge of a husband?
I love holidays.  Not only do you get a day off from work, but you get to decorate the house!  Christmas is definitely one of my favorite holidays because of this.
And every year I fight my dear, sweet, loving husband because he refuses to help.

I always like to decorate the weekend after Thanksgiving.  It's officially "Christmas season" and we usually have nothing going on.  Well this year, we were busy, but we had Saturday afternoon free, so I took out all the boxes and began to decorate.  Amanda wanted to help, and I had to call in about 600 favors to get Mike to take a picture of us, so here you go.

I am really not too fond of the fake tree.  My family always gets a real tree, which is steeped in family tradition.  Always the first week fo December, we go with two other families and traipse out to the "u-cut" Christmas tree farm (which is getting harder to find in the middle of Los Angeles now!) where we spend 2 hours finding the perfect Christmas tree - not too tall, but wide and full, and no holes.  And it has to smell deeeeee-liciously of pine.  Then we all traipse home and have dinner together and recount our search for the perfect Christmas tree (expect pictures after this weekend!)

Mike on the other hand, always had a fakey-Christmas tree in their house.  Our compromise is that years we fly to Illinois for Christmas, we put the fake tree up, and the years we stay home we get a real tree.  That way we're both happy, right?

Anyways, I discovered over the past several years that Mike has his way of making the fakey look "perfect".  So after I set it up and put the lights on, I let him go to town.

Here he is "teaching" Amanda how to spread the branches to give the appearance of the tree looking full.

And I spent the next hour putting ornaments high on the tree so that the cat and the baby can't get them and break them.  Our tree now has the upper half looking awesome, and the bottom half looking bare.  I am guessing it will be like that for several more years until the cat stops caring and the kids are old enough to know better.