Thanksgiving, Christmas Trees, and Holidays IV

Thanksgiving came. I ate. I enjoyed time with the family. Grandpa came down from Stockton. I always like taking pictures when he's down. Here are four generations of Anderson decendants: Grandpa, Uncle Donnie, Me, and the boys.


I went shopping at 6:30 the next morning. I don't know why I do that to myself. I try to get into the Christmas spirit, and end up having to come home early so I don't go postal on somebody. I saw some interesing things while I was out. One I will shares is something that I found humorous and that pretty much sums up the mentality of most of the people I encountered.

While checking out with my loot at the local electronics store, I overheard two "ladies" yelling at the girls who had the very important job of standing at the end of the line holding helium balloons. The conversation went something like "We better still get the good price when we get to the register. It's not our fault that we couldn't find what we came here for. You people be all hiding stuff so we can't see it (under the HUGE yellow sign reading 'Adverstised Special')." To this, the employee responded "Oh you don't need to worry about the price. We pretty much give people the sale price until we close tonight." I guess this wasn't good enough, because the "ladies" demanded the girls name, and made some empty threat about coming after her if they didn't get the good price. I caught the balloon girl's eye while this was going, and she just rolled them at me. I smiled and chuckled back. I think we both agreed, these people were crazy.

We picked our our Christmas tree this weekend. The fam and I went to our local tree farm, where we have been going for about 10 years, and picked out two trees. One for us, and one for Flipside. Here we are in front of our find.

Lastly, a brief history of Christmas trees - again, plagerized from numerous reliable web sites.

The fir tree has a long association with Christianity, it began in Germany almost 1,000 years ago when St Boniface, who converted the German people to Christianity, was said to have come across a group of pagans worshipping an oak tree. In anger, St Boniface is said to have cut down the oak tree and to his amazement a young fir tree sprung up from the roots of the oak tree. St Boniface took this as a sign of the Christian faith. But it was not until the 16th century that fir trees were brought indoors at Christmas time.

The first decorated tree was at Riga in Latvia, in 1510. In the early 16th century, Martin Luther is said to have decorated a small Christmas Tree with candles, to show his children how the stars twinkled through the dark night.

In 1846, the popular Royals, Queen Victoria and her German Prince, Albert, were illustrated in the Illustrated London News. They were standing with their children around a Christmas Tree. Unlike the previous Royal family, Victoria was very popular with her subjects, and what was done at Court immediately became fashionable - not only in Britain, but with fashion-conscious East Coast American Society. The English Christmas Tree had arrived!