Thanksgiving

Well, the way I see it, if you don’t post about Thanksgiving by the time Christmas rolls around then you’ve pretty much let the moment pass. Since it’s not Christmas for another couple of days, I figured I’d go ahead with the Thanksgiving update.

We had a great time seeing family for Thanksgiving. I’ve already mentioned in the last post that my brother and his family came in from Nashville and stayed with us… but what was also very cool was that Candice’s sister and her family also came to stay with us, so we had a wonderfully full and joyous house for a few days. It was awesome. Asher loved spending time with his cousins, and one of the highlights for him was being introduced to a little thing called the Nintendo Wii…

The seriousness of Asher’s face in this picture makes me laugh every time… I’m not sure if he actually thinks he’s playing or not, but he definitely punched those buttons on his controller like his life depended on it! Here we are snuggled up on the couch for a little Thanksgiving reading. Notice the wildness of my hair is beginning to match that of Asher’s!

One afternoon when the kids were getting particularly restless in the house, we got everyone bundled up and I took them all outside for a little activity.

This is our quaint little house, and next to it is a gigantor pecan tree—I’m not sure how tall it is, but I figure you could stack about three more of our houses on top of one another before you got to the same height. I mean… just look how huge!

The “activity” that I had in mind for the kids probably wasn’t exactly what they had in mind. This huge tree was shedding pecans like crazy, and we would be fools (fools, I tell you!) to let them all go to waste! Although we don’t have any footage of the actual event, the culmination of the pecan picking was my own expedition to climb high enough into the tree to shake some of the branches and, quite literally, “make it rain”! The problem, of course, is that this tree is a beast, and it was not easily shaken. I got about 10 feet higher than our house before thinking, “okay, this was a seriously crazy idea.” I was nowhere near high enough to be able to legitimately shake the tree… though this didn’t stop me from trying. And I’m told it was quite a sight seeing me up in the tree violently vibrating my whole body in an attempt to shake the tree—youtube really missed out.

In then end, though, there were no broken bones and we ended up with a heck of a lot of pecans. This season we’ve picked about 35 pounds of pecans off that tree. We took them to the nut house in town to have them shelled, and we cashed out with about 17 pounds worth of pure, unadulterated pecan halves. A beautiful thing…

At Candice’s Papa’s house, her family got together for their yearly affair, and it was good fun to be a part of it for the first time in a long time. Here’s a shot of some of the boy cousins…

Candice also got together with all her sisters… and when this happens, craziness ensues… poses are struck…

… staring contests are had…

… and memorable moments are captured…

As soon as Thanksgiving was over, we began the process of decorating for Christmas. We were especially eager to get all our decorations out of the top of the closet because we hadn’t seen them in four years and opening up all the stuff was kind of like opening a time capsule with lots of memories inside! It was fun and now that we have an extra helper, it was even more joyous.

The Christmas tree that we bought at the hectic Wal-Mart Thanksgiving sale looked pretty good with all our ornaments on it. We put our advent calendar next to the tree and prepared ourselves for an awesome Christmas 2013 season. I love it!

This is Candice’s face after I had tried to convince her for a few minutes that our Christmas decorations would not be complete without a giant inflatable baby Jesus and Bethlehem star atop our roof.