Traditions.

 Every year on the Friday after Thanksgiving we decorate the house for Christmas.
While other families are out taking advantage of Black Friday sales and come home dead, we choose to spend our day at home blaring Christmas tunes while decorating.
You might remember that last year, we decided it was time to sell our old Christmas tree for a new, taller,  pre-lit tree. This would be our first experience with the new tree, seeing it decorated with all its glory.
I had to work so while I was busy, Jason brought the tree up along with our other decorations and set to work on the painstaking duty of assembling the tree and getting the branches properly placed.
Evan thought it was a good idea to help daddy out.

 Jason hadn't quite finished getting the branches situated and I snapped a quick picture of it. Then I began to wonder. Has any family bought a fake tree and not realized they needed to get the branches all situated and just left the tree straight out of the box with no finagling? Because if so, that's dumb.

During this whole preparation phase, Dawson was getting impatient and was chomping at the bit to decorate the tree. Naturally I had to explain that he comes from a mother and father that are OCD and that means there is a SYSTEM in place.

First, I don my I ♥ Presents socks.

Jason took that picture. Just to keep things real, I'll allow you to view my attempt:

Next, we set up the tables to put the boxes of decorations on to keep our carpet from getting dirty.

 Then we open the boxes and get out the ornaments in a certain order. I like a coordinated tree. OCD. We had to go buy more ornaments since we have a taller tree and therefore we also bought some color coordinated ribbon, icicle ornaments and a new tree topper. All of these items were laid out to go on the tree first. Once those items were applied EVENLY SPACED (that spacial coordination is Jason's problem), then we could move on to the "fun" decorations as we termed them. As you can tell, the tree is the first item to be tackled in our decorating tradition.

Picture of the tree once it was completed. This is after I swept up some of the needles that had fallen off. Speaking of needles, is it just me, or does everyone feel the need to wash your hands 33 times once you've finished decorating your tree due to the grimy residue left on them?  If you were to zoom in on this picture, you might notice that I do not vacuum in a straight line. My OCD has its limits.

Take a guess at how many "JOY" ornaments make their way onto our tree.

Here's a picture of our old tree- 

 followed by a picture of our new tree

I love our new tree, but something seemed off. I couldn't pinpoint the problem though, so we moved on.

Next we put the two snowmen in their appropriate places.

 And then the spoon holder goes in it's spot on the stove. I don't collect snowmen, in case you were wondering. If I could collect anything in the whole wide world, I would collect money. So there you go. A great gift idea for yours truly.

 I then set up the nativity which goes squarely in the middle of the mantle over the fireplace. This usually means their is a trail of Styrofoam from the packaging that sticks to everything and drives me crazy, but such is the way of suffering in order to get baby Jesus where he needs to be. Once I'm finished, Jason gets the stockings hung near the chimney with care. We also have a small tree that sits on the left corner of the fireplace but Jason hasn't gotten that brought up from the basement yet. I think he's afraid Evan will eat it.

 Speaking of Jason, the last item that makes it's way into our tradition and out of its box is this "Welcome" sign that he hangs on the inside handle of our front door. I've tried and failed many times to have him hang it on the outside but he refuses. My only guess is that he wants people to know they are welcome once they've made it in.

This is not a tradition (gasp), but I wanted to get out of the house, so later we went shopping at Ross where Jason found a new tree skirt that perfectly matched our coordinated goodness. When we brought it home and got it arranged just so under the tree, I realized that was the missing item I needed to complete the tree. The other tree skirt matched, but it was too small because it was for our old tree. I feel like I can relate to Monk in this way. If you have never watched the tv show Monk, you will have no idea what I'm talking about.

We end our night of traditions by watching one Christmas movie before bed. It's either Elf or Christmas Story. Then I asked Jason to get one final last picture of our tree.