And So It Begins

My wife spent part of yesterday with our daughter at her apartment helping her 'fluff out' her (artificial) Christmas tree. And by the time I came home in the early afternoon from some errands ahead of what promised to be our first serious snowstorm of the season, she had ours up as well.

We've had artificial Christmas trees almost all the years we've been married. I have allergies to pine and our first Christmas after marriage, Sigrid got a small cut live (though, technically now dead) tree from the Offenbacher ChristKindls-Markt (very much in the shadow of the one in Frankfurt am Main and all of them completely eclipsed by the Nuernberg one). I sneezed and itched for a week to ten days afterward, proving my point about allergies and we went the artificial route since then. 

Our current tree is almost as old as our kids so it's not fooling anyone, at least undecorated but Sigrid does a spectacular job, without any of my help which she neither encourages, otherwise solicits or in any way welcomes, which is just as well as I have no patience for the strand by strand layering of tinsel, the untangling of the Christmas lights, with the obligatory find-the-burned-out-bulb that keeps the strand dark, and the placement of the ornaments. 

Sigrid spends hours and sometimes parts of days getting everything just so and I very much enjoy it guilt-free because NONE of my labor was involved. My absence from her efforts is one of my presents to her for the holiday season.
-bill kenny