I had the chance to post my part of the A.I. Christmas story and decided it didn't totally suck, so that's nice. And the lady who wrote after me did a fantastic job (she managed to pull in angels and a bit of Christmas magic...so all is well in my Christmas story world now :) ).
With all that out of the way I feel much better. I didn't screw it up--although to be 100% honest I was *this* close to writing that the main character woke up, relieved to find out that the first 8 chapters had been a bad dream.
I would have laughed, but I'm pretty sure the rest of the writing group would have killed me.
On the Christmas train of thought, I wanted to mention that the family left at 7 a.m. Saturday with 3 other families in our neighborhood to cut down our Christmas tree. We have done this for the past 5 years or so, and it is one of the few traditions we have that we are consistent on.
For $5, you get a permit and can cut down any tree you like in certain forests. Our permit is for trees around the Scofield Reservoir area near Price, Utah. Mainly because one of the men in the group is the one who started this neighborhood tradition and he and his wife are from that county.
We all drive in tandem, hike up a mountain, look at dozens of trees, and our family is usually the last one to choose a tree and get it back down the mountain. We also get the tallest tree, so it takes more to find just the right one.
We have 12 1/2 foot ceilings in our living room and always get a tree that goes all the way up. (Which means we over shoot and end up bringing a 20 foot tree home and complain about the 7 feet of tree we managed to drag down to the trailer...7 feet of tree is heavy, by the way).
Luckily we haven't had much snow to wade through for the last couple of years. The last time we had snow to deal with in our tree cutting expedition, was when my husband had just torn his ACL and was waiting for his surgery the next week. Because of his injury the neighbors had gone on their own the week before, so our family drove up alone and my husband sat in the suburban with the youngest 3 kids and they watched as me and the other 4 hiked through thigh deep snow, found a tree 'close' to the road and then took an hour dragging it back to the car.
That was NOT my favorite tree cutting trip.
My husband had the video camera and enjoyed filming our struggles. The rat. He even managed to film a couple of the times when one of the kids would lose their footing and get run over by the tree before we realized we had a rider down.
Good times, good times.
This is me and the kids in front of the tree we finally chose to cut down.
We have the kids take turns cutting the tree, so this year it was my son JD's turn. This is him getting the saw stuck. Again.
And this is my husband Doug (white cap) helping load the trees onto the trailer with our friend Jeff. I couldn't post the whole family and leave him out. Right?
And this is the finished product. I don't have the tree skirt around the bottom yet, and most of our ornaments are handmade ones that the kids did in school over the years..so it is a hodge podge type tree. But we like it.
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