In town, we divide and conquer. Joshua and Skeeter go to the real estate agency to ask for sleeping bags. Mom and Grant head to the grocery store. We leave the men—Tess’s and Amy’s husbands—in charge of picking an evergreen tree and securing it to the top of one of the cars, while Amy, Tess, and I stroll around the shops with the kids in tow, hunting for Christmas ornaments and decorations. We scour the one-of-a-kind stores for the prettiest shiny balls, porcelain angels, elves, and hangable snow globes.
After lunch, we stumble upon an ornament-crafting workshop and I’m not sure who’s more excited about attending, the adults or the kids. By the end of the afternoon, we’ve produced a respectable array of cotton-stuffed felt ornaments: white snowmen, red Santas, yellow bells, and brown rei
