After-Thanksgiving traditions

Thanksgiving was a blast. We had a great time with family, had good food, and were thankful for lots.

The Friday after Thanksgiving has its own traditions as well. The most publicized is the 'crazed shopper' tradition of getting up at an ungodly hour to spend money on stuff you may or may not need, primarily because it is on sale. The other tradition (at least in my family) is to decorate for Christmas. The Christmas tree comes out of its box, the stockings get hung, and the whole house seems to fill with red and green the month leading up to Christmas.

We partook in both traditions today, to some extent, but I'll talk about the second tradition, and we'll see if you can guess what we did for the first. To start, we had to clean the house before we could fit a tree anywhere. We had retrieved my dog figurine collection from my parents' house earlier in the week, and Josh hung the shelf for it yesterday. Once those were out of the living room, we could put the tree there.. We bought the tree not too long ago, and we could only find pre-lit trees, to our dismay, but it ended up looking pretty good. When we picked the tree up, we also got weights to hold the stockings, because we didn't want to damage our apartment's wood mantle. The stockings, most of the ornaments on the tree, and the star at the top we bought last year right after Christmas, when they were all 50% off or so. The only ornament we've bought this year was an "Our First Christmas" ornament that I like very much. A few other touches around the house add to the festive mood.

So, that was the afternoon. What did we go shopping for in the morning, you ask? Anyone figured it out?

OK, I'll tell you. It was our big Christmas gift we picked out for ourselves- a Nikon D50 digital SLR camera. We've had a lot of fun with it today, as you can probably tell. We were allowed to open it early so we could capture this Christmas season with it. I'm excited.

Our family is ready for the season, are you?