fwrictionreview:

I’ll tell you what you see in the video because it’s cute as hell. The boy: eight, blond and shaggy haired, almost swallowed up by an adult-sized sweatshirt; the girl: eleven, black Chuck Taylors, black hoodie, bleached blonde bangs, when they’re not hanging in front of her eyes, tucked behind her ear. They’re decorating the tree, with the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “Linus and Lucy,” the most joyous of all Christmas songs, playing in the background.

His hair bobs in time to the music, as he does the Monkey, does the Frug, slides around in his socks and does Schroeder rocking out on the piano. She sorts through ornaments and hooks, and carefully hangs a homemade paper angel. He climbs on the arm of the couch to hook a colored ball up high. They dance and play and throw things at each other, which is what siblings do.

And in the background, every once in a while, you hear the man with the camera giggle because the kids don’t know that he’s recording every bit of it.

It’s Austin, 2005, and we’ve lived in this house almost six years. It’s the house I wished I had growing up. A big old house with tall ceilings and pine floors, with oak trees filtering the late day sun outside the double-hung windows. A house where you can call the kids for dinner and hear the clatter of toys hitting the floor and the stampeding of feet down the stairs. It’s supposed to be our home forever, a place where our kids can grow up, and where our grandchildren can someday play under these same trees.

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