O Tannenbaum, OTannenbaum.....

So, I know that, given my snarky personality and love of mocking, I should be commenting on the Illinois Governor's insanity and the basic a**holiness of the "Ponzi Scheme" folks (that term also bugs the bejeezus out of me, for some reason), who stole from charities, churches and other unsuspecting people, but I don't have it in me. Turns out there will always be jackasses a-plenty in the world, and really, the actions of these morons speak for themselves, no help needed from me. Although the Blagojovich thing in particular made me laugh for the better part of the morning when the story broke. Especially when I read some of the transcripts of calls that were made with his wife shrieking profanity in the background. I, most assuredly, do not have the worlds' cleanest mouth (Have I mentioned the time Kai asked me to "read this fucking book?" No? Another time.) but that woman could make a sailor blush. It was really quite impressive.

Anyway, with that out of the way, I can proceed with the update on the Christmas goings on around the Hotel Dumpling. We went and cut our tree on Sunday. First, you have to have your tree scouts dressed and ready on their vehicle of choice. In this case, sleds.

Grab the nearest adorable grandparent you can find. In this case, my mom.

And if there is a beautiful Swede hanging around, so much the better.

Kai takes a Charlie Brown approach to tree selection.

But cute woodworker guy and I felt called to this beauty.

Noah was a little annoyed here since he was trying to sleep. Nothing puts him to sleep faster than a little fresh air.

Cute woodworker guy quickly felled the tree and the big kids "helped" (aka. got in the way) him drag it back to the truck.

Grace got bored "helping" so she and Hilda took the easier way back.

Once home, this beauty did not disappoint once we had it covered with lights and decorations. The glowing table next to it is our snow village and is a work-in-progress. Or it might be done, we are losing steam in the decorating, but we could get a 14th wind, who knows.

Ahh yes, our ginger bread house.Yeah, what can I say. The roof kept caving in, so I finally chucked it and it is now topped with iced and be-candied cardboard. It was really quite annoying putting it together. And even with those modifications, the roof still had to be propped up with those little pieces of cardboard triangles. Then we let the kids do the decorating. We started to get all anal about it and realized, nobody gives a crap, so it is a festive explosion of candy and icing, some of which is now missing because they woke up at 5am and started picking at it, and some of which is now missing because apparently the dog, who is older than dirt, managed to revive enough to stand on her rickety hind legs and eat most of the chocolate "rocks" that make the pathway. (Hilda witnessed this moment of canine cunning, I did not.) I'm surprised the effort didn't do her in completely. It has caused some fairly horrendous intestinal distress that I won't go into at this point. In short, things are moving along at a normal, crazy, and disgusting pace around here.

This is the Christmas card Hilda sent to her family in Sweden. So adorable!

They look so sweet and harmless in this picture. Don't be fooled. They have been jacked up on sugar for about 2 weeks now and the cumulative effect is getting terrifying. In January, I'm sending them to sugar rehab.

Coming soon, hockey pictures, ballet pictures and I was tagged last week by a friend, but haven't been able to give the question any serious thought. Or even any non-serious thought, really.