We tend to go for the cheaper, slightly imperfect “Charlie Brown” trees (with the compromised side facing the wall and decorated – you hardly notice). We bought our tree very early this year - A few days after Thanksgiving. John happened to see it on my car, parked in our driveway shortly after we brought it home. He was so excited about it that he phoned me and asked me if we had decorations for it. I said we had, they were hand me downs and were pretty tatty and tired. John explained that Mum was going to put up their short, vertical imitation tree (which could not hold many decorations) so he had many to give to us. That very evening he came to visit with 3 large boxes of decorations. But we waited a while before we “trimmed” the tree.
For the first few weeks we merely had the tree decorated with lights. We wanted the kitten and Jack to become accustomed to it and therefore be less likely to touch it. 2 weeks before Christmas we started to put the decorations on it. Jack helped us. We let him handle all but the glass decorations. Some of the items were amazing – biplanes, miniature bird feeders, a wooden “referee” moose with a string between it’s legs (when pulled it’s limbs went up), a gingerbread man, some of the colorful glass balls looked like their packaging had never been opened. The tree was transformed into something magnificent! We were so excited about it we invited Mum, John, Campbell and Kelly over for drinks to oogle at our tree. Needlesstosay there was not much looking at the tree due to Jack becoming highly animated with his new audience and us (later) playing our new DVD of Shaun The Sheep. It was a short and sweet gathering.
One evening a few days later I got a call from Mum “Just what kind of boxes did John bring you?” she uttered an expletive deletive when I answered. “Those are my decorations and I have been collecting them over the last 20 years!” I apologized and told Mum she could have them back…”but could we just appreciate them for one more evening?” “We will only give you a little grief when you take them back and we might even let Jack watch you taking them off the tree”.
Mum insisted we keep them and she trimmed her skinny imitation tree with lights only.
When we took our tree down last week we carefully repacked and returned all Mum's beautiful ornaments.
These photos demonstrate just how much Diego loves Jack. They are as thick as thieves when they play together. Diego loves to be involved in everything.
We got a bit of snow. We have been making paths for Jack with our snow-blower. Here is Dick working on one right now.
We had a GREAT day yesterday. 
We tend to go for the cheaper, slightly imperfect “Charlie Brown” trees (with the compromised side facing the wall and decorated – you hardly notice). We bought our tree very early this year - A few days after Thanksgiving. John happened to see it on my car, parked in our driveway shortly after we brought it home. He was so excited about it that he phoned me and asked me if we had decorations for it. I said we had, they were hand me downs and were pretty tatty and tired. John explained that Mum was going to put up their short, vertical imitation tree (which could not hold many decorations) so he had many to give to us. That very evening he came to visit with 3 large boxes of decorations. But we waited a while before we “trimmed” the tree.
