Well, Happy Thanksgiving everybody and welcome to the Christmas shopping season!  Gentlemen and ladies, start those shopping engines!

I don't know what it is this year, but the Christmas season just seems to have started extra early this year.  We have a neighbor that put up their Christmas lights the week before Thanksgiving.  And what is it about the stores having all of their Chritmas decorations up even before Halloween this year?

I dug out all of the Christmas stuff out of the closet on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and we started up decorating.  As you can see, the kids took an active role in decorating.  Even Michael, who was sick most of this weekend helped out against our better judgement (he's wearing his PJ's in the photo).  Our Christmas tree this year is a 9 foot monster, which is a good three feet or so taller then our usual trees.  As your can see, the kids had about the bottom two feet WELL covered, which left me with about 7 feet of tree to decorate.  And you can't really tell in the picture, but Kailynn's idea of decorating was either laying the decorations on the floor and hoping they wandered onto the tree themselves, or laying the decorations on a branch, which was a vast improvement over laying them on the floor.

Kailynn IS a lot more excited this year.  I think she's starting to understand the concept of Chistmas and Santa Claus.  Last year she just kinda hung out and was a little too small to know what was going on.  She did enjoy tearing paper on Christmas day, but she had more fun playing with boxes rather then toys.

This year, however, she knows EXACTLY what Christmas is, and she knows EXACTLY what toys she wants.  Her and her brother compiled their list of Christmas presents for Santa and need to send it off to him.

And now the toy commericials are starting to come more and more frequently.  We have begun to dred the commercials between the cartoon times of the day beause we have two voices yelling out "I want that!" during the several minute commerial break.  My retort is generally "Put it on your list" and that usually quiets things down until the next commerial. 

And the toys are SO much more cool then when we were kids.  When we were kids, we had ROCKS to play with, and boy, we better feel LUCKY that we had rocks, because when our parents were kids, they were chased by DINOSAURS and they were thankful to be chased by DINOSAURS.  Not only that, but they were chased uphill, knee deep in SNOW by dinosaurs.  Not like these kids now-a-days that can ride around in Humvees and there are no more dinosaurs.  The toys now-a-days know your name and can do your taxes!