On the eleventh day of Christmas

For the eleventh day of Christmas, a photo memory:

Eleven threads adorning,

ten strings of tree lights,
nine Moravian cookies,
eight hours of playtime,
seven resolutions,
six nights, scant sleeping,
five first time puffs!
Four at St. Nick's feet,
three playmates,
two crawling buds,
and a joyful, thankful family!

A tribute to our lovely 2011 tree!  The freshest one yet!

Tonight, T and I took down the tree.  Sniff, sniff!  In the process of taking down the ornaments and lights, we noticed a few rouge decorations that hadn't yet caught our eyes.  Small, one-to-two-inch pieces of yarn had been carefully cut and laid across the lower pine branches.  A few had even been tied around ornaments to help them stay on the branches. Sweet G-Bear, our craft and ornament aficionado, had mentioned several times this season that we didn't have enough ornaments decorating our tree. Apparently, she had taken it upon herself to partially remedy the problem.  T's childhood family friend, Renee, who has a tradition of giving us an ornament every year, would have been proud of G-Bear's work.  The care with which the threads had been cut (all similar sizes) and placed on the tree (or tied to ornaments) melted our hearts (which must have been stone-cold and grinchy to take down the tree in the first place).  

And so sitting here in our living room bare,

we give thanks for our tree and our sweetest G-Bear.