Year Seven

Nate and I just celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary on November 29th. I can hardly believe that seven years have gone by since we said our vows with ol' Dart Henry at Elfindale Chapel in our hometown. We celebrated by spending the weekend prior in Hudson Valley doing what we most love when it's freezing cold in NYC; eating good food and drinking good drinks. But on our actual day, which was a Monday, we took the day off and decided that we'd trim our tree and have leisurely lunch.

What I have learned after seven years of marriage is that there are certain things that Nate does not like to do and causes instant agitation. One is putting together anything from ikea and another is getting anything down from our poor excuse of a storage unit in the guest bedroom. This happens to be where our holiday items were stored so I decided to have these extracted on the day before our anniversary in order not to start the day off on the wrong foot. Surprising, this was pretty painless and we left the next day to choose and decorate our perfect tree from down the street (I’d liken the beaute to nothing short of a Charlie Brown wonder).

Suffice to say, I’m like my mother and grandmother in the way that I get hot and bothered by a piece of glass on a string. I’ve been known to collect ornaments from places we've traveled over the years and am giddy when they arrive in the mail from my mom in July; even if it's a plastic pig. Nate and I both love decorating each year and have our favorite ones to put on the tree. Though I’m easily the most laid back of the two, I try desperately not to rearrange his ever-so-sloppy ornament placement and have worked hard over the years to not suggest a more “appealing” place for his Royal’s ball. Either way, it's one of my favorite times of the year and after our tree was trimmed, we left for a long lunch at a French restaurant and spent a few hours drinking wine into early evening.

We decided to go home to open our gifts, make dessert and just as we were toasting year seven to a glass of champagne our tree came tumbling to the floor, ornaments and all. The only bonus was that after we finally fashioned it back in the stand, I was able to decorate again with what ornaments survived.