Good gravy, will this year never end?

*sigh*

I suppose I should document our Christmas cards this year.

Outside: 
Inside:

We had the most fun staging this photo, because it's not often that you get to drop a giant tree on your children and then tell them to move this way and that because they don't look dead enough.

 Last year, we bought a tree and argued about the height of it because we always end up getting a tree that's too big for the room once you put it in the tree stand. Now we have "fourteen-foot ceilings," as he keeps putting it, so we got a much bigger tree than prior years, but I still kept saying certain trees were too tall and we should pick a shorter one because The KingofHearts keeps forgetting that the fourteen-foot point of our ceiling has a wall attached to it and the rest slopes downward, so it's not actually fourteen feet.  We took the tree home and put it up and I made the mistake of saying out loud that we actually could have gone a little bit bigger with the tree.  That was the living end for The KoH and he told that story about the next eleven months about how I was Wrongy Wrongerson from Wrongsville, Wrongington and I said we had to have a shorter tree, but the second we put it up, I totally agreed with him and he was right and he'll never listen to me again.

So this year, I said nothing about height of the tree. No. Thing. 

 I let them pick the tree they wanted and thought would fit.

Here it is in all its glory:


 This was after he cut like three feet off the bottom.  If it seems like it's bending to the will of the ceiling, you're right, it is.  We cut the tip off [insert circumcision joke here] shortly after the photo was taken.

 Because as it turns out, see that sloped ceiling?  There's only about ten feet from the ceiling to the floor if you want to actually put the tree in a place where you might actually be able to walk around it or where it's not spreading its branches into the fireplace... which... I'm no fireman, but seems like a bad idea to me.

 But either way, it's gorgeous and I love it.  Even if the star has to be attached six inches lower than the top of the tree.

We are having a lovely holiday season, despite the fact that 2016 has treated us like a horse that was rode hard and put away wet.

 I might have shared this gif sometime last year, because there is no more appropriate image I have yet seen that describes how awful 2015 was for me. If I were to make a gif for 2016, it'd just be me continuing to bounce around at the bottom of the slide some more, and maybe a six year old wanders up and kicks me in the ribs a couple of times. 

 I'm looking forward to a much better 2017.  It has to get better, right?

 Please?

 Bonus beautiful kids picture that we couldn't quite make work for a Christmas card.