Oh Mai Family: Paging Charlie Brown: We have your tree.

After weeks of nagging, Truong finally put some effort into really looking for our sad sad tree. He found it wedged in the way back of the overhead hanging shelf in the garage. Probably wedged in the way way back for good reason, as you will see later.

Let me explain some things first before you all think we deprive our kids of the Holiday Spirit.

Way back when (before kids) we had real trees. The thing was: our German Shepherd Mikah kept peeing on it. We eventually broke him of that habit but let's just say I still checked the tree after work every day and wasn't terribly surprised if he marked it.

Then we adopted Loki the cat. Those of you who knew us back then will surely remember that cat. He was a very cool cat who thought he was a dog. He was also a cat that I knew in my heart of hearts would climb up my beautiful Christmas tree, knock it down and cause a house fire, burning us all to a crisp in our sleep.

So we stopped getting a tree. Then we moved down here (with the same two dogs and the same two cats). Then we had Kael. And we now we had to travel 7 hours every Christmas to spend it with my family. In the end, we sort of fell out of the Christmas tree tradition somewhere between the dog peeing on it, the fear of house fires with the cat, and the "we're not going to be here anyway" mentality. Plus Kael was too young to really get it so he wasn't missing out on anything.

Fast forward to last year when Kael started preschool and learned about all this stuff in class. His questions and desire to be a part of the holiday fun is even more prevalent this year. So last year I broke our non-tree trend and I got a tree. Not a real tree because as Truong is so fond of telling me, we're going to be gone for 2 weeks and who wants to leave a potential torch in an empty house?

So I got a fake tree. And unfortunately, I was a little late to get on the bandwagon so I had to hunt around for a pint-sized, pre-lit tree. It's really just so we have something to put Kael's presents under so I didn't want to shell out the big bucks for a fancy tree. The big fancy tree is in San Jose.

Last year I thought it looked fine. I let Kael hang ornaments on it and he loved it. That's all that matters, right? Well, last night as Truong and I took out our fake tree, I didn't remember it looking so... anorexic. We spread out all the "branches" and some "pine needles" fell off so I tried not to adjust it so much, in fear of it really shedding and we'd end up with just wire. We stood it up in the corner and looked at it. That's when I realized that we had the Charlie Brown Tree. I'm thinking next year we're really going to have to get a real tree and retire this one. I actually don't think this one is going to make it the one week we have left, the way the kids have been playing with it.

I told Shana about it and she reminded me to "fluff it out" to which I responded "you can't fluff out pipe cleaner branches!" It's so sad looking but sad in a really funny way. The kids had a great time trimming it, and it's their tree so they can do whatever they want to it. Before you look at the pictures, know that it looks way better with the lights off and tree lights twinkling.

I loved watching their faces as they decorated the tree. Until, as we watched Malia playing with and banging two ornaments together, Truong wondered how much lead was in those things.

Great. Happy Holidays.

Kael hard at work strategically placing every ornament.

Let's take a closer look at the utter focus on his face.

Malia trying to figure out how to grab more ornaments with two already in her hands.

Malia's way of hanging ornaments: stick her arms way into the middle of the tree, let go and watch the ornament fall down the tree until it gets caught on something. This method really bothered Kael. Really bothered him.