Santa's Been Here!

Santa has been here. In fact, I think I heard him a couple hours ago, and boy, did he sound tired! I hope he makes it to everyone else's house.

This is our Christmas tree. Our Perfect Christmas Tree, actually. Heidi isn't 100% sold on its perfection, but I knew it from the moment I saw it. Elaina was cold and fussy. I was cold and fussy. The tree was standing there, perfect in its mantle of 12-degree December air, perfect in its position there by the entrance of the Christmas tree lot. I knew—knew that this was the Perfect Christmas Tree.

Isn't the turtle cool? So, here's the thing about the turtle: When Heidi was a little girl, she had a big stuffed turtle that she liked to lay down on. Now, we have an old footstool shaped like a turtle that Elaina likes to sit on. But the footstool is wood and leather and not at all comfy. It seemed necessary for Elaina to have a nice, comfy turtle to lie down on. We're happy that Santa thought so too.

Elaina likes school buses. I don't know why. I don't know how/whether she even knows what they are. I can't imagine that she does. Maybe she just likes them because they're big and yellow and sometimes people in them wave at her. She says "hi" to school buses...which is a little odd, I know. She says "hi" to lots of inanimate things. She's a friendly sort that way.

If her Daddy had gone out on the 23rd to look for ideas to give Santa, this inflatable school bus playhouse thing is what he'd have come up with. Since Elaina can't write yet, Heidi did most of the looking for ideas to give Santa as to what Elaina might like. Thanks to Heidi for encouraging me to take a trip like that of my own after work one night. It's hard to fit that trip into the time between work and Elaina's bedtime, but it was really worth it. Looking for Santa-suggestions for your little girl is really a neat experience.

We got this ornament of a bear in a Hanbok (traditional Korean clothing) when we were in Seoul last year, knowing this would be the first of many years it would hang on our tree.

A trick for taking Christmas tree pictures when you don't know what you're doing: Your camera may just have a pre-set like "fireworks" or "candlelight" that absolves you from having to know how to set your camera's shutter speed or f-stops or whatever. You absolutely can't hold the camera yourself unless you're a cyborg (and if you are, that's pretty cool—you probably don't even need a camera, do you? You're not even reading this on a screen are you? Just a heads-up display? That's what I thought. I'm pretty jealous). So back to the bit about not holding the camera yourself. I don't have a tripod, so I prop the camera up on something and use the timer on the camera so I'm not touching it when the picture is actually taken.