It's Christmas Eve?!? Oh holy ... night

The clock on the computer tells me it's 1:23am which means it's officially Christmas Eve and, as usual, we're nowhere near ready. I took this picture of the tree on Friday afternoon ... and it still looks the same. We've had three abortive decorating sessions so maybe we can find time before Santa arrives to throw a couple of decorations on it. Or we could just go for the minimalist natural look ... harking back to the Martin Luther-inspired origins of the tree as described by Garrison Keillor:

Martin Luther was walking through the cold, dark woods at night when he looked up and saw the stars shining through the branches of a tree and thought "The stars in heaven are boundless but are contained here within the branches of this humble tree. I'll cut this tree down and take it home and set lights upon to celebrate the birth of Christ, the Light of Lights, here on Earth."

But that was a story told to us by women and men know differently. Martin Luther was walking through the woods, it was night, it was cold, and it was dark. And he walked ... WHAM! ... straight into a tree. He hit it hard and as he lay there on the ground a bit stunned he said "if someone would put lights on that tree this wouldn't have happened."

So we're not procrastinating, we're rejecting the crass commercialism of the season and harkening back to a simpler time to preserve the true meaning of Christmas ... and procrastinating.