Whew!

What a week. We've been so busy with school and helping friends and tackling holiday errands. Thankfully, the shopping is over and we can concentrate on the season. Thursday found us home enjoying school and holiday decorating when a friend in need called. She needed us to pick up her son from school as she was going to be late, otherwise. Being that these are our close friends, you can deduce the answer. :o)

That evening, C.m. and her friend passed the time giggling and sipping hot chocolate and playing defenders that were going to capture me...or atleast, fight me off with a Nerf gun when i gave the five minute 'fore departure warning. :o) You can also deduce just how long that 5 minutes turned out to be. ;o)

Friday we spent the morning and the a good portion of the afternoon saying "goodbye" to one of our beloved stores with our dear friend from the night before. This store is "beloved", as you can imagine, because it is the kind of grocery store where spending 4 and 1/2 hours in chatting away with your best friend and gnoshing on fresh pastries from Seattle bakeries and yummy coffee drinks is not an activity that is frowned upon by employees there at all. :o) Like Cheers, however you can also finish grocery shopping for the week--which took us another hour, since we lingered in the kitchen gadget section and stopped to talk to other acquaintances from the area that just happened to be shopping that day too. :o)

Saturday, we headed off to Sumner in search of the family Christmas tree. Beautiful, yet chilly yesterday. We headed to a place called Red Barn Tree Farm where we did not spy any barns, let alone red ones, however, there were plenty of trees to be had. And we spied this cool old truck.

And to boot, some friends that Moose works with spied us out in the field luckily, so we were able to catch up and sneak peeks at each other's little ones. Any other time of year, you can go months without running into anyone out and about! Love thoses kinda of Christmas presents in such a big world we live in!!

Then we made it to the Santa parade just in time. Here are a few pictures of things that struck me as amusing:

well, okay, this is not amusing at all...it brings tears to my eyes and thankfullness to my heart.

And finally, Jolly Ol' Nick in an old SFD engine.
After Santa's parade, we had some time to kill before Mass, so we shopped.
The antique store i visited had these cute candy stockings.

and a new tree topper, since we are erecting two trees this year (one real and one fake), we needed another. I am anxious to do some research on this as it says it was handcrafted in West Germany for Shiny Brite.

We truely liked it for it's uniqueness though.

And being from West Germany, it will remind us of our family friend who passed away in October.

Today we are having our cherry tree taken down and our 200' of English Laurel hedge thinned. Also, Moose gets to contend with a leaky water line. After receiving a water bill for the last two months that equated the water bills of our hot summer garden watering days, we knew something was amiss. Moose dug around out back and found a HUGE leak in the line out by the chicken coop. That sucker was losing over 1,000 gallons a day! Bah Humbug!

I'll be manning the sewing machine here once i get this finished and hopefully will have some more crafty posts this week as well as some more pictures of so newly acquired cuteness from talented Etsy crafters...you know who you are!

Hope you have a great start to the week!