Christmas Tree

A couple of weekends ago, we headed out for the annual cutting down of the Christmas tree. We drive out in the parts of rural Louisiana that are in the hour or two from Baton Rouge, and there's not really another time that we get to these parts of the state. I forget from one year to the next that rolling hills of East Feleciana Parish are kind of pretty. Even more so with the little bit of changing leaf color that we see up there. It's not New Hampshire in September, but it's prettier than you would think.

The drought this summer pretty much wiped out most of the cypress trees that we favor. We had to go back to a tree farm that we has sworn off in the early aughts when a mean woman yelled at us for strapping our tree to the roof of a soft top Jeep Wrangler.

I didn't realize that we were going back to that place, but I recognized it instantly. I asked Mrs. theskinnyonbenny if she remembered the insulting nickname that she gave to the mean lady, and she pulled it from her memory pretty quickly.

As is usual, this is also the first day of the year that I start listening to Christmas songs. also marks the first listening of Christmas music.

I'll be Home for Christmas. Christmas (Baby Please Come Home). Home for the Holidays. In short order, the radio got me thinking about how soon it will be that the kids our out of the house, living their own lives, and I can only hope that they'll chose to come home for holidays over visiting their partners' parents or going to a destination with friends. I started to get choked up.

Put another way, I almost started to cry over something that might theoretically happen several years from now. So when it actually happens, just assume I'll be a worthless pile of figgy pudding for a few days.

Here are a bunch more photos from our December.