I so struggle to walk the line of enjoying Christmas without overdoing the materialism of the holidays. Today we decorated our tree. To start with, I struggle with the tree. I know they grow the trees for the purpose, but it still seems awful to cut so many trees down for a holiday. We tried using a live tree one year, that we would later plant outside, but it died, and we still had the needles all over the ground anyway. So we got a tree this year at a farm stand of a guy we know. I don't know where he gets the trees, but he's a nice guys and works tirelessly, so I guess I felt okay about forking over the $30 for our tree. Last year's mini $5 tree was pretty awesome, but I guess that what you expect when you buy your tree a few days before Christmas. The tree we bought is already dropping needles like Makili drops changes of clothes all over the floor, but who's counting. Decorating it was SO much fun for the boys, and since we've had this tradition of each of us making an ornament for the tree since 2007, it was very fun for the boys to open the ornaments up and have us talk about why we made what we made. They loved it and were immediately obsessed with making more ornaments so their contributions would be noteworthy. I was pretty into that. The boys and Ege discussed the best distribution of ornaments, and where everything should hang. It was really cute.
I've tried to get the boys into making gifts for other people though and I haven't been as successful. As soon as I show Makili something that he could make for someone else, he immediately wants his own, and every time he does a good job on something, even a drawing, it is officially his. Every time I buy a gift for someone, wrap a gift for someone, and include him, he is immediately completely obsessed with what he is getting, where his gifts are. Which of course prompts me to use the old Santa wild card. "Santa won't bring you gifts unless you're good." And that sort of feels yucky to me, even if it does work. The truth is I enjoy getting a really thoughtful gift for someone, making gifts for people, but I don't know how to balance that with really disliking my children's obsession with MORE.
