It's beginning to look a lot like...

...Christmas! In our house! For real!

As those who know me - or have been following this blog for at least a year - know, I'm not all that into Christmas. But I always figured that when Jack was old enough to actually understand what was going on, we'd start incorporating and instituting more holiday traditions into our home.

We kicked off the holiday season with our annual visit to Santa. At first, Jack didn't want to take pictures with this strange old man. We had tried to prep him by reading him "The Night Before Christmas," and I told him that Santa knew Pooh. That gave him pause, but he was still skeptical.

"He doesn't know Pooh," he said.

"Oh, yes, he does," I assured him.

Last year, I wrote that our streak of same Santas as well as smiley Santa pictures had been broken. This year, I'm happy to report that a new streak has begun. As usual, we went to visit the Santa at the UTC mall, and I was thrilled to see that it was the same one that we took pictures with last year. There was no one waiting behind us, so the Santa and the photographer took their time. Santa asked Jack what he wanted for Christmas. Since we haven't really told Jack that he gets presents for Christmas (because, really, why start if we don't have to?), he didn't know how to answer. Santa saw Jack holding Pooh (as usual) and started singing the "Winnie the Pooh" theme song. That helped melt the ice a little.

Eventually, Jack let Santa pick him up and sit him on his lap, but he still wasn't really smiling. When I exhorted him to smile, he gave what I call his "maniac smile," where he smiles really big, raises his eyebrows, and bugs out his eyes. Not the look I was going for. Finally, Santa gave Jack a little tickle that made him laugh, and the photographer snapped the picture just in time. Yay!

A couple of days later, we headed down to the Hotel Del in Coronado for their Christmas festival. Jack loved looking at all the Christmas lights on the drive down. It was then I really started thinking that we ought to have a tree for our home.

So the following weekend, we went to a local nursery to check out trees. Neither Tom nor I have ever had a proper Christmas tree in our adult lives (I know "someone" will say that our mini tree last year didn't count), and I was still ambivalent about it. However, we recently have been doing a lot of work in our backyard, and we knew that we wanted to plant a citrus tree. So we figured we would buy one now, decorate it for the holidays, and then afterward we could plant it in our backyard.

Here are some pictures of Jack picking out the tree - we ended up getting a dwarf tangelo - and decorating it:




And the finished product:



Later that same evening, we went to "Candy Cane Lane," a block in Point Loma where the residents deck their halls and their houses in over-the-top Christmas lights and decorations. We walked around and drank hot cocoa with friends, and Jack had a blast.




I guess there is something to this Christmas stuff after all. :)