Oh, you crazy tannenbaum.

There’s nothing quite like the smell of a Christmas tree. Especially right after you’ve brought it into the house and right before your nose gets used to it and you cease to consciously smell it. The fresh-Christmas-tree scent is one of the few scents I wish I could get my nose to smell for the whole season, but I know that by tomorrow I will have to stick my face directly into the branches to smell the tree. In a week, I will be crushing needles to smell it.  I can’t be the only one who’s experienced this.  In fact this is probably why Yankee Candle is able to do such an appalling trade in balsam-scented candles.

Right now however, the tree is two days old, and smells just like a little piece of the forest in our newly cleaned living room. And the best kind of snow is falling outside: The kind that looks pretty, collects on the ground, but does not make the roads treacherous.

And because I’m grateful for all these things, I thought I’d write the blog I failed to write a few weeks ago. Inspired by a few other people’s Thanksgiving posts, I had meant to make a list of five little things for which I’m grateful. Not the big things (wonderful husband, awesome parents, brother and future sister-in-law, roof over my head and job that I love) but five little things that make me happy every day. Things that seem so good that they might be revoked by the government. Read more