Decorating the Tree

The hot chocolate dishes are in the sink. Empty Hallmark Keepsake Ornament boxes litter the floor of my family room. The fire is down to its last embers, and the house still has faint remnants of pepperberry wreath candles and Perry Como wafting throughout. It is Christmas time again at the Rybak household, and all is as it should be.
Cherubic Morgan, dressed in pale pink jammies, with pink slippers and her blond hair wispy around her face, clutching the macaroni ornament she made in her "3 year old class", and boisterous Rhiannon, in bold red and white laughs as she narrates her little brothers movements, and searches for the ornaments that bear her engraved name. Adorable Lucas, pudgy and effervescent in his almost-too-small Gap jammies, hair slightly askew, sits on Daddy's lap, "helping" him video tape the festivities. And Mommy stands back and thinks that in little moments such as these, life is a snowglobe. Perfect, amazing, iridescent and magical but fragile. I hold my own special ornaments, the beautiful ball that my grandma gave to me when I was first born, looking slightly worn but still readable- "1977", a gold trumpet that my mother had attempted to engrave herself, when money didn't stretch far enough, a homemade felt stocking with my 4th grade picture stuck in the tiny rectangular hole. I remember making that ornament in class, funny to think Rhiannon is only 2 years younger than I was in that memory.
Lucas has discovered the train ornament, and discovered how quickly and easily all of the ornaments come off the tree. I notice that morgan has a pronounced chocolate handlebar mustache, and that Rhiannon is off in search of the cat. There are a few naked spots on the tree that I will fix when everyone is asleep. We read the first of many Christmas books the kids have piled up in their room, and Morgan asks, for the 14th night in a row, if tomorrow morning is christmas. I kiss her, and smell pine in her hair. Rhiannon begs me to pick out her clothes for tomorrow, and asks a few more logical questions about Santa and his mystical ways. I hug her, and notice she has hidden a couple of books under her covers for covert after-hours reading. I bring Lucas downstairs and nurse him. He falls asleep murmuring "mama". I look around at the hot chocolate dishes in the sink, and the empty Hallmark Keepsake Ornaments littering the floor of my family room. It is Christmas time at the Rybak household, and all is as it should be.