All I Want for Christmas is...a Bedroom Door

Today we took Nikos to see Santa for the first time. As you can guess, he was wildly excited about meeting "the Big Guy" (note to Catherine - not to be confused with Charlie Jacklin...apparently Santa was too busy to attend my baby shower.) Here we are in line, giving Niko advice on what he should ask for from Santa...

"Ask Santa for the Volvo SUV - the one with navigation and the dvd player."


"See if you can get a gift certificate to Home Depot or Lowes..."


After we finished meeting Santa (picture to be posted tomorrow after I scan it at work - apparently you can not take Santa pictures with your own camera at the Walnut Creek Santa House.) we went shopping for our Christmas tree. YES, we still have not set up our tree yet. As most of you know me, this goes against every fiber of my being. I mean, I own TWO fifty gallon storage bins filled with Christmas supplies. However, with our house in a state of chaos, we (read: Taki) thought it would be more important to paint the walls before we got the tree. Details, details. So, now that we are all (mostly) painted, we headed down to our trusty Home Depot lot to purchase our tree. AND THE LOT WAS CLOSED. ALREADY SHUT DOWN. DONE WITH TREES. So sad. So we headed over to OSH (luckily Taki is intimately familair with all of the hardware stores in a 15 mile radius) and picked up our tree. Usually the decision -making process takes about an hour, with me walking around, making Taki untie a bunch of the trees to try and find the best one, without any holes, crooked parts or dead spots. This time it took us all of three minutes to pick one tree from the group of five, sad, Charlie Brown-looking trees in the front of the store. While Taki was paying for our tree I promised Niko that we would have a better tree next year, one that we would actually buy and put up before the Ten-Lords-of-Leaping day of Christmas. Please enjoy some photos of our tree "hunting".

This one comes from the Cindy Kienzle School of Picture Taking.

Nikos was totally enamored with the tree!


Taki then made some snide comment about how Nikos was dressed like a rare English book dealer and that he needed to be more manly and get his hands dirty. So we made him tie the tree to the car.


And this one makes me want to pee my pants. Maybe because I have been drinking...

I mean, look at the look on his face? So nonchalant. So Taki. Is this my child??