Time For Some Additions...

 I noticed an ornament hanging on our Christmas tree the other day, and one thing came to mind...

There's been some changes since then.

Life's funny. Sometime it seems like life moves slow. The busy work season of the year crawls, hot summers and cold winters seem to take forever to end, but then you turn around and it's ten years later...a decade has passed. It's a good thing we have kids because to them, ten years is half their lives (a little more, a little less...). Ten years ago I started attending writing symposiums and writing conventions as an attendant and participant.

Then years ago, our youngest was nine years old.

Fast forward a decade and our youngest is in trade school. Our next youngest is married, our next youngest/second oldest is helping create video games and getting paid for it, and our oldest is married and has become a father himself.

You look at our Christmas ornament and you see none of that.

But, that's what ornaments are, really...just snapshots of what life was like at the time. They're reminders of the life that is when they're first introduced, and what life has become as they age a year at a time...

Kind of like us.

We got a few new ornaments this year. They're not dated so they may just end up as one of those ambiguous decorations that we picked up one of those years, another in a long list of date-less ornaments we hang up each year. What we need are new ornaments that reflect the state-of-the-family, things like "Grandbaby's First Christmas," "Welcome To The Family, Son." You know, things like that.

Maybe that's why people sometimes get bigger and bigger trees as time goes on. Got to have a place for the new changes.

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree...When Did You Get So Expensive?

Simple, I thought. I had the day off and we figured it would be a great day to load up the family and get ourselves a real Christmas tree. Except for a few years, we've driven a few towns north and picked out a nice tree from a seller out of Montana. We've gotten shorter trees from them, extremely tall trees from them, full trees and not-so-full trees. We skipped last year getting our tree from them, so we weren't even sure they were still there. We were happy to realize as we turned off the main road and rounded a corner that indeed, the tree lot was open.

That excitement lasted long enough for us to park the van, climb out, and set foot on the lot. And after we spotted the price on the first tree we saw...poof, excitement gone.

When did real Christmas trees get so gosh darn expensive?

One of the reasons we liked getting trees from this particular lot was the price. They were cheaper than many of the places, and we could usually get a taller tree at a good price. Something happened in the past twenty-three months. Trees got expensive, and by expensive, I'm talking double the price.

We had a budget and we considered just a couple of trees that were a few dollars over that budget. Of course, we could have picked up a beautiful 3' tree, perfectly shaped. It would have looked great on top of a table. We decided to look somewhere else. We tried two other places and neither had what we were looking for.

A few years back, we found a nice tree at our local grocery store. Sure, it's not a tree from a tree lot, but it came at a good price. It turned out to be a pretty good tree. On the way home from tree shopping this afternoon we stopped by the grocery store, found a really nice tree, bought it, threw it on top of the van and headed home.

I don't know what we're going to do for a tree next year. If prices go up in the next couple of years as they have in the past two, we may break down and buy, "a great big, shiny, aluminum Christmas tree."

But, for this year, we got us a real one.

So, Now What Do They Do...With All Those Gingerbread Houses?

So, we're shopping at Walmart last week and the first thing I see (after saying, "hello" to the greeter...) are gingerbread house kits. There's a display with several dozen of them. We had already made plans for our own gingerbread creation, so we didn't need to buy one. 

Usually, I don't notice things like this, especially at Christmas where there are holiday-themed items all over the store. But, we take ten steps and what do I see? Another several dozen gingerbread house kits.

We go another ten paces, and there it is again--more kits.

We turn down another aisle, another display. All in all I counted six displays in the front corner of the store and there may have been more that I missed.

It got me thinking...just how many of these kits do they sell, anyway? I know the store moves an unbelievable amount of product every single day. In fact, I'd probably be blown away if I saw the actual numbers of what the store beings in. There's a lot of people that shop at this Walmart, and not every family will buy one of those kits. Plus, it was fairly close to Christmas so there were limited days to shop.

I'm sure the employees who order the kids have a good idea of how many they'll need and how many they'll sell. It would be interesting to know how many of these things were still on the shelves when the store closed for Christmas. I hope they guessed right and everyone who wanted one got one and they had hardly any remaining. But if not, I wonder what happens to the gingerbread houses that nobody wanted.