The turkey has been picked to the bone and the family has gone home. Now, it’s official. The Christmas season is here.

I can officially play the music and prepare to ride that whirlwind roller coaster that will find us at Dec. 25 before we know it.

Over the last 10 years, our little family has developed a lot of traditions we have to squeeze in, made all the more important as we may not be here next year. 

Of course, there’s the kid’s Christmas concert. A Christmas party with friends that is not to be missed. A Christkindlmarkt that will have me out shivering in the cold most of a weekend. Hopefully, we’ll be able to sneak out to Harpers Ferry to see the luminaries and live nativity and check in on just how much the little angels have grown.

Though the event will have passed by the time this hits print, the Illumination at Antietam National Battlefield is a sight to see: winding your way through 23,000 candles - one for each soldier killed, wounded or missing at the Battle of Antietam.

At home, I’ll begin my long, protracted, many-years battle with our outdoor lights. The outdoor snowflakes are temperamental, and only work properly if put together in the right order, which, of course, I never remember. A smarter person would mark them in some fashion, but in my defense, it is usually pretty doggone cold when the time comes to take them down.

But, by far, our grandest tradition is our trip to get the tree.

My girl is a Christmas fanatic, and stories of her spending hours in the frozen tundra of the North Country looking for the perfect tree, dragging the kid as a toddler around in a sled, are legendary.

In our far more temperate clime, we’ve fared better. The last few years, we’ve stumbled onto a gem — a Christmas tree and alpaca farm.

I’m not much of a farm guy, but even I am bewitched by the rolling hills. Fields of trees and a herd of alpaca in a beautiful location such as that seems pretty idyllic.

But it isn’t rest and relaxation when we go, we are there with a purpose: to fell our majestic evergreen.

We each have our part to play: I’m the muscle (we’ll use that term loosely), and apparently, the comic relief. The kid, who finds her favorite in about five minutes, becomes the official “stander,” fending off those who might want to steal our contender while her mom embraces her inner Clark Griswold to find us the fastest, tallest tree she can find.

Thank goodness for 10-foot ceilings.

Once the tree has been selected, everyone gets entertained as I grunt my way through chopping it down and dragging it to the prep area.

After some hot chocolate and a little quality time with the alpaca comes the hair-raising hour drive home, hoping our tie down holds and our tree stays on the roof where it belongs.

When we do finally wrestle the tree in the door, it never looks as fat or as tall as we thought, but once adorned with all our decorations, it is enough.

It’s easy to get caught up in the race to get everything done in time for the big day, but in the long run, as the kid gets ready to head off to college, the memories I will cherish will be the ones we shared together. 

So I’m going to stop and smell the cocoa.

I was never much of a dog guy.

Some of it could be chalked up to a bad experience with a Doberman when I was a tyke.

And some of it was circumstance. My Mom loved cats. She had a Siamese that came before me and that lived until I was 16, so she was the only pet I knew for a long time. By the time I moved out, Mom had adopted three cats. 

In fact, come to think of it, the night I left, she replaced me with another cat.

That didn’t mean I wasn’t around dogs, of course, but I was nearly 40 before I had a dog around the house.

My girl had a Newfie when we met, and she warned me early on the dog didn’t like men. A lot hinged on how she took to me, and I think she’s still a bit disappointed that instead of growling at me, she put her head in my lap like a lovesick puppy.

Nowadays, we have two dogs — Sochi, our Great Pyrenees, and Rose. I’m not entirely sure what Rose is, but I think she’s distantly related to Jabba the Hutt’s cackling little monkey-lizard sidekick.

I can’t take the blame for Sochi, her dog momma adopted her on a trip to upstate New York on the “adopt now, tell Chris later” plan. She’s a big, lovable, nearly 100-pound ball of slobbering, shedding love who still thinks she’s a lapdog and that it should be perfectly fine for her to climb into bed with you.

But Rose? Rose is pretty much my fault. True, I wasn’t the one who spotted the little furball puppies at the farmers market that day. Also true, with that tall profile and those spindly legs, the dog the pet rescue brought that day didn’t look related to those furballs in any way. But, I’ll own it, I’m the reason she’s still here.

Skittish — and most definitely not potty-trained — I think she knew she was on thin ice by the end of a two-week tryout spent chewing anything within reach and avoiding pee pads in favor of carpets. That’s likely why she decided to jump in my lap and give me the sad eyes. I probably looked like a soft touch.

Spoiler alert: It worked. Since that day, Rose has been “my dog.” She’s loud, underfoot, simultaneously dominant, territorial and frightened of everything. Like me, she growls at neighbors. Those birds have it coming. And she can’t hold her licker.

She’s even managed to almost knock off my significant (I think it was by accident, she can be a jealous girl). She escaped with a fracture wrist, elbow... and maybe a shoulder. For the record, I do not condone that behavior.

On a whim one evening I taught her to fetch a ball and she’s been obsessed ever since. We have indoor ball and outdoor ball, and she knows the difference. Just ask her. 

If I’m not paying attention, she’ll deposit every ball she can find at my feet. She been known to drop rocks on the floor if you aren’t paying attention. She knows when I smoke my pipe, it’s uninterrupted ball time, so she’s learned the sound of me getting out my pipe and the smell of the tobacco in my pocket.

No, she’ll never win “Best in Show.” Too many bright and shiny objects to distract you when you are supposed to be running that course. Heck, I’m not even sure what she is, certainly not purebred. But, she’s alright by me.

Yep. A boy and his dog. It just took 40-odd years.