There was something missing in our lives, a hole in the Barn.

And so we drove across the river to Kingstown, where there are Christmas trees.

Alden, who makes all the important decisions, made an important decision.

She and Kato helped me with the heavy lifting.

As it turns out, they couldn’t have been less interested in the tree itself.

Not when the plastic netting was available.

Robbi had a different take on the plastic netting, which threatened to entangle everything.

Meanwhile, I hung the lights on the tree, arranging the three strings of bulbs in a careful and deliberate way. One of my favorite moments each year is when the tree is plugged in for the first time and the room fills with the warm glow of the holiday season. I plugged in the lights and waited for the glow. There was no glow. Something was wrong with the bulbs. Apparently all three strings had gone bad since last Christmas.

Robbi, being a patient and methodical person, endeavored to test each bulb to find out which ones had burned out. Note that, while patient, she wasn’t patient and cheerful.

I, on the other hand, was too impatient to attain the warm glow of the holiday season to bother with this kind of nonsense.

And so we headed off to the hardware store to get more lights.

Having attained glow, the next step was cookies. Specifically butter cookies, a Behr holiday tradition.

Alden is getting to be an ever more useful sous chef.

Though she did take umbrage when I suggested that she was too young to break an egg.

An attitude that quickly reversed once she’d proved me wrong.

From a kid’s perspective, part of the warm holiday glow is tasting batter.

And getting to use cookie cutters.

These cookies aren’t just for eating. They are our ornaments, and so we use cookie cutters to such classic yuletide shapes as dinosaurs, chickens, hippopotamuses, and baby carriages.

Thanks friend and subscriber Virginia for our R and M cookie cutters.

And for my favorite, the barn cookie.

The tree illuminated and the cookies baking, the warm holiday glow was in place for another year.

The first thing I do when I get up every morning is plug in that tree and see how it brings the living room to life. I think it must spend all night chatting with the gas pump. They seem to be familiar old companions as they anchor the far end of the hayloft with their light.