Christmas comes every year, but when you’ve spent as much time traveling, moving around, and childless as we have, you only really catch it about half of the time.

Don’t get me wrong–we always make it to Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner with our families, but–we *don’t* always manage to stuff stockings, bake cookies, or even get a tree. We just don’t. Or at least, we haven’t.

This year is different. This year our almost-one-year-old isn’t old enough to understand Christmas, and yet I still feel the need to show it to him, and to experience the holidays as a family for the first time. So even if all I plan to wrap under the tree are the toys he already owns (sue me), we all went together to pick out that tree, not chop it down because it was too damn cold, pay way too much for it, and then let it sit on the porch for two days until we could remember where the tree stand was. We’re doing our best…

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