O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum, wie treu sind deine Blätter!

We finally got our Christmas tree decorated this morning. :)

Claire and I tried really, really hard to be patient about getting a tree this year.  We put our other decorations out ages ago. It felt a bit like putting on a hat and gloves and fancy shoes, but no dress.

If I were more mature, I would raise my eyebrows slowly and cooly and insert brisk, pragmatic words here about the importance of patience, etc., etc., and whatnot. But you will have to search elsewhere for such a woman. Alas. 

Bob has been gone on business trips, and has had long hours at work, and then we were all gone to San Francisco.  And then he and Claire were both quite sick this past Friday and weekend (with two separate illnesses).  So the month has been zooming by, treeless. 

If Bob were gone for one long trip, of course Claire and I would have charged cheerfully ahead without him, and had that tree up in no time. It would have been crooked and would have lost most of its needles as I dragged it across the lawn from the car, and I would have had to do a running tackle to put the star on top, like in Elf, but it would have been up.

But Bob has had three separate, shorter trips, and was home in between each, so it seemed good to be patient and wait for him to find time to decorate it with us. After all, (1) he is the founder of the feast, and (2) he likes decorating Christmas trees a lot, too.

Then -- oh, joy -- we finally got a tree the day before yesterday (Sunday) when Bob felt a bit better. But you know how it is -- you feel better than you felt before, but not as well as you feel normally, and by the time you buy a tree and put it up, you realize you're not completely well yet, and you need to go to bed rather than stay up to decorate.  

So then Claire and I were patient some more, all through Sunday night and yesterday, when Claire was home sick from school, lying on the sofa and staring at that bare tree, and right up until today, when she was home sick again, and we were both looking at each other and thinking, "Would it really be that bad if we went ahead and decorated it ourselves?"

Of course we kept this traitorous thought to ourselves.

But then Bob surprised us by going in late to work this morning so that we could all decorate the tree together. 

Hooray!