"It's the most wonderful time of the year!"

Since Thanksgiving is now over, I am in full force Christmas mode. The day after we got back from Thanksgiving vacation, I had the Christmas tree out and Annabelle and I had a blast decorating it. Annabelle is now old enough to understand some parts of Christmas, especially the lights. She loves to look at all of our neighbor's lights around their house.

However, we are a little behind in our own lights. I think we might have missed the ideal time to put up lights (pre-Thanksgiving). Michael went out to see if he could do a little bit last night, but found a thick layer of ice on the edge of the shingles, right where the hooks that hold the lights need to go. And the temperature doesn't look like the high will be much above freezing for the next few weeks at least, so it looks like the ice may be here for a while. Hopefully, we'll get something up around the house before Christmas. (And just so people can appreciate what it's like here, at 10:00 am this morning, it was 5 degrees outside, with the high of 23 degrees today.)