The Tale of the Christmas Nazi

Cayden has been pleading since Halloween to put up all the Christmas decorations.  On Monday, November 15 I finally gave in.  Don and I spent most of the day prepping for Cayden's return from school by cleaning and dusting and rearranging some furniture.  We got out our 3 Christmas trees: 1 for the piano room front window, 1 for the family room window and the small red and white one for Cayden's room.  You may remember my boycotting of tree decorating last year and how we bought 2 trees from the Festival of Trees. Well this year I wanted my big tree in the front window so we got it out ready to decorate when Cayden got home.  After cleaning 3 bathrooms, dusting lots of rooms and doing our prep work, I made 2 big pans of  Rigatoni which was basically our family Baked Ziti recipe but I did not have Ziti so I used Rigatoni instead.  I also made chocolate chip cookies from the Nestle Tollhouse recipe on the bag chocolate chips.  I made myself ill on the cookie dough since that was only thing I had eaten all day.  Note to self...Take Pepto PRIOR to consuming half the bowl of cookie dough.  Cayden was home by 3:20.  He was so excited that he stood in the middle of the front room and jumped up and down screaming until we told him to stop.  Then we put up decorations for hours and hours and hours.  Don just kept bringing in tote after tote after tote and Cayden kept emptying tote after tote.  Cayden can remember from year to year where everything goes and it all has to be in the same spot as it was previously or it just won't work for him.  If we tried to divert his attention and hide some of the decorations he caught us and reminded us what was still missing.  Don had to leave at 5 for a business dinner but we persevered.  By 7pm I was exhausted.  Everything was up and tree was decorated, the totes were all stacked ready for Don to put away and the floors were all vacuumed.  I was so tired I wanted to cry.   Connor and Caleb wanted to help for about 5 minutes and that was it.  Cody just wanted to make fun of my BAH HUMBUG sign and rearrange the letters so if said variations on the word bum.  So much for our annual Christmas decorating FHE.  The one thing we did not put up was my Willow Tree nativity because I was just too tired.  I told Cayden that I would put it up the next day while he was at school.  He came home and I had not done it yet so he talked his dad into doing for him.  Connor bought him some lights to go around his bedroom door so not only does Cayden have a Christmas tree in his room but lights around his door too.  We have not done the outside lights yet but the Christmas Nazi will continue to pester us  until we do.  It probably won't happen until after Thanksgiving though.  This may have been the earliest we have ever put up decorations.  Heil Santa!