Where are you Christmas?

Each day a little bit more goes up and comes out. This year my big motivation for having the house decorated before the 24th (no, I'm not kidding, sometimes it does come down to that) is that I'm having four Japanese ladies to our humble home on Wednesday – there's nothing like a deadline to get me motivated. So the tree is up, the lights are on ... if only we can carve a moment out of a crazy work schedule for our children to decorate the tree. With the exception of only a handful of ornaments, all we brought with us to Japan are the children's ornaments, so it falls to them to decorate the tree. One is methodical in his approach to placing the ornaments on the tree, the other can't seem to get through the task fast enough and has heavily edited what he wants to put on the tree, the last child is careful – looks at each of her ornaments with care and gathers information – "who gave this to me?" "where did this ornament come from?" Jeff jokes and says "if you mom goes before me you know I'll just be making all this up for you."

The Christmas music is playing and we enjoy a piece of gingerbread post tree trimming while Faith Hill sings "Where are you Christmas?"

Good question. In a vain attempt to get a photo out of my three children that we just might be able to send out this year, not only an hour before we were out on the edge of the base in some obscure place that I'd picked hoping that I would have three cooperative subjects. The light was fading, and with way too much teenager attitude permeating the air the few photos I was able to get looked anything but jolly. Sigh. "Where are you Christmas?"I wondered as I walked back to the car seething, one successful photo – that's all I wanted not feeling very much in the Christmas spirit.

Back at home the mood shifts, the spirit of Christmas softly filters through the air ... I'll take what I can get at this point. It's not exactly a tree trimming party with Eggnog and lots of laughter but it works for us. I'll keep plugging along, knowing that each of these moments is a potential memory in the making, and that it requires balance, a lot of balance. Recognizing this fact does for the moment anyways, leave me inspired.