Patty and I love the holidays. Decorations, Christmas music old and new (not until after Thanksgiving, of course), making cookies and carmel corn, shopping and snowblowing,  it’s all good. We just celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary last week, and have each seen our own traditions from childhood come together to become new traditions. Our honeymoon in Vermont one week before Christmas caused us to buy a lot of Christmas tree ornaments that year, which has since turned into a yearly tradition of a new ornament each year. Patty’s love for birds (who knew…?) has fueled a multitude of bird ornaments over the past few years. The vision is for a full-blown “bird tree” on the porch in the coming future. Keep your eyes peeled for that coming Christmas-traditions blog around 2012.

Another tree-based tradition began about 7 years ago, when one of Patty’s Christmas gifts from a boutique in Albany, was gift-wrapped in a hand-painted Chinese food take-out container. You can’t just throw that kind of thing under the tree. So, for some random reason, I stuck it in the tree. When she inquired about it, I explained it like it had been a family tradition for hundreds of years. Since then, the “gift in the tree” (I worked hard at that creative title) has been a Christmas tradition, opened on the morning of our anniversary. Obviously, her anniversary gift will never be a flat screen TV or Smart Car, although that may actually fit…..