I've been seeing a lot of Christmas decorations going up over the last week or so, and we were putting the tree up at work today - in the main entrance. It looks really nice, but it's also got me thinking about the family tree. It hasn't been put up for the last three years, partly due to I'm the only that bothers with it, and that gets lonely (me and my three siblings did it together for a few years, before they grew out of it/stopped doing it), and partly because of what happened five years ago at Christmas... which brings me to this year.

I heard my mum say earlier in the year that she likes to see the tree up, and I plan to put it up for her this year, but at the same time I'm not sure I can bring myself to do that, because of what happened five years ago. Basically my sixteen-year-old cousin died suddenly sometime overnight on the 26th/27th of December 2004. We were told on the 27th. And then his funeral was two weeks later on January 8th - two days before I had to go back to school and straight into my mock exams.

And it's not really a Christmas woe, seeing as it happened at the end of August, but my back is hurting again. Every time I roll over in bed it hurts. Just sitting at the computer is making it hurt, but that's after the games we were doing at Girl Guides tonight (I help at a local group). I have no idea what I did to it when I fell, well slipped, in August, but evidently I did a fair bit of damage (I never got it looked at, so I don't know how much).