A New Tradition

It's kind of become a tradition over the last few Thanksgivings that my mom and my younger brother come up here for a visit. We eat and we laugh and we watch movies and generally have a good time. This year was no different, but we added something (for the second time) that I think is going to become a tradition. Instead of hitting the stores on Black Friday to shop, we hit Amish Country.

There is a two-ish county area here in Ohio that has a lot of Amish people, restaurants, quilt shops, and crafty places. One entire downtown area (Berlin, pronounced BRRR-lun, not Ber-LIN) is quilt stores and restaurants and craft shops. We'd gone down there once before and decided to do it again because none of us like fighting the crowds at the mall on Black Friday.

Our favorite store is Tis The Season and - you guessed it - it's filled with decorated Christmas trees and manger scenes (one of them retailed for over $10,000!) and personalizable ornaments (bebe was scandalized because ALL of the swimming ornaments were for boys) and, of course, Santa's Helper was available for the kiddos to talk with.

This is one of my favorite trees from the store, because it reminds me of Jack Frost's Christmas in "The Santa Clause 3". All of the blues and the white flocking and the icicles hanging down from the ceiling are just...wonderful, don't you think?

We spent about an hour in that store and I think I could have spent at least twice that, just wandering and looking at the trees and letting all of that holiday spirit infuse my soul a little bit more.

None of us bought anything, but we have pictures of bebe with Santa and pictures of some of our favorite trees. . .and I think this will be our new Black Friday tradition - whether we have company or not - because our day in Amish Country was about being together...and isn't that what the holidays are all about?