Doctored Christmas

Everyone has pictures like this from their childhood. Yourself as a baby or toddler helping your Mom and Dad decorate the tree and there is no doubt based on those pictures that everyone in them is having an incredible magical fun time.

I'm starting to learn that there really is a lot of doctoring that can be done, even with family photos. Crystal, Kylie and I tried to put up one of the Christmas trees last night. It was my tree and all we were really trying to accomplish was getting the actual tree put together. As a side note, my Mom and Dad bought me a new artificial tree this year because my old one had had it. We couldn't afford it, so I was very grateful.

Kylie was pretty tired and all she really wanted to was play with the branches. Anyone who has put one of these trees together before knows that the hard part is keeping all the different sized branches organized so that you don't lose any or get them mixed up. This was made a little easier on me since the tree is new and the colored stickers aren't missing or faded yet, but I was still getting pretty stressed when she would mess up the piles. Old habits die hard.

Kylie had a screaming fit every time I had to take the branch that she was playing with to put on the tree and would accept no substitutes. I tried to have her "help" me but she was having none of it. She even got mad that we shut off "Big Bird" in favor of Christmas music. All in all, what was supposed to be a fun family evening ended up giving us all a headache.

However, when we looked at the pictures on the digital camera, everyone appears to be having a great time. It was all in the timing. Taking pictures in the brief non-screaming phases and deleting the ones that showed what really happened. When my wife scrapbooks all this, no one who wasn't there won't think that it was a great evening filled with family fun.

I still think Christmas will be fun. Kylie still isn't two yet, so she is still a little too young to understand, but the pictures will always tell her that last night was a total blast.