Sam decorates the tree

Very nice and slow day as folks ready for xmas.. One thing that’s always important for us is finding ways to bring Sam into our celebration. Today one task we had was to decorate the tree.. we have a tradition of decorating them in interesting themes each of the past 6 years… we’ve had zombie trees, space ships, mexican trees. We were hard up this year thinking of a theme.. Ideas we’d discussed were a ‘chemist-tree’.. with decorations from the periodic table.. nah.. too cerebral.. then we had the idea from Gabes recent (forced) reading of the Scarlet Letter in school. of putting a giant read ‘A’ on it .. and calling it and ‘Adultree’.. .. no.. too much of a downer.. ..

Then we had the idea.. We did a ‘red bull’ tree.. The reason it was uch a great idea is that we have 5 boxes of red bull cans that sam collected up in the attic.. they went from trash to relic as did many of his belongings. Sam loved red bull.. and it remains our toast of choice to his memory. One of the boxes contained a set of cans that sam and I had cut apart into sheets. our plan was to decorate one of the walls his room with them.. but… we never got there…

So.. we had this roll of cut apart redbull cans.. perfect for making garlands.. Gabe has a huge collection of redbull pop tops to go with..

gabe strung up some of the intact cans..

while I cut apart the unrolled sheets… It felt great to handle these again… .. it was one of the last projects sam and I did together..

brit and hannah helped me staple the strips into garlands..

and up on the tree they went

sam had painted one of hte cans gold for soem reason. max took it and made a great red bull angel for the top of the tree..

then the kids made us dinner.. Max made a beautiful beet and gorganzola sald, matt made he,p burgers, ian made scalloped potatoes, Hannah made quinoa salad… and gabe made crepes for desert ..