I’ve been saying it for six years: once we get a decent-sized house out here in Denver, my family has some holiday visits to make up. It’s finally happening.

Six years — 10-hour drives, both ways, with an additional 4-hour drive between my family and Jackie’s — all to make the scene and hug a bunch of people I barely know or know about.

Mostly, it’s just to see my parents, her parents, and my sister.

So the house is bought, the room is there, and my parents, bless ‘em, are finally coming out.

Punch line? We are *so* unprepared.

Decorations? We’ve never owned a place where it was legal to put stuff on the outside of the house, so we need to get lights, right? Christmas lights are apparently accumulated over the course of a decade, because I’ve been to the stores, and looking at the lightshows around the neighborhood, I’d guess the average Joe Schmoe on the block has got five bills worth of lights blinking outside.

We went and got an artificial Christmas Tree, because after the last live one, I’ll be damned if I let dying flora that big into my house again. It took an hour and a half to set up and get looking nice. It does look nice. Hell, to me it looks normal — I don’t think we had a ‘real’ tree at my family’s house until after I moved out.

But the Damn Thing is still shedding everywhere. I don’t need my artifical trees to be that realistic.

Stockings hung by the chimney with care? Hmm. We’ve got the chimney — no stockings — all the traditional stockings are at my folk’s house. Need to get some of those.

Aside from the christmas stuff, this is also a house inspection: my mom hasn’t been out here yet, and I wrote already about the cleaning frenzy last weekend — that didn’t even get us halfway done. The upstairs carpet is just as bad, the only guest bed we have folds into the couch, the stairwell needs paint, and did I mention Halloween, when my exuberant ‘puppy’ pulled a leg off our only dinner table?

In my cleaning frenzy, I’m finding the parts and pieces for little fix-its and projects I really should also do before they get out here…

What’s that thing that they say? Be careful what you wish for.

Ho. Ho. Ho.