Christmas Trees

Ah, the Christmas Tree. Of all the Christmas traditions celebrated in our family, it seems as though the Christmas season hasn't really been put in full swing until the tree is up. For the past few years because of costs we've had to use a fake tree, but this year we saved up to get a real live Douglas Fir. Okay, well, it's not alive anymore, but you get the picture.

Let me tell you, I never realized how much I missed the scent of a real Christmas tree. Sure, you can get candles and potpourri that mimic the scent, but nothing can quite measure up. Not even being in the woods itself. For some reason, I can never smell the trees in the mountains. Maybe it's because my nose is usually running because it's so cold...

We decorated our tree on Friday, and I thought I'd share some photos with you. Our tree decorating style is what you'd call "eclectic". We don't have matching ornaments, and we don't have a certain style we follow. In fact 90% of the ornaments we have has a story behind them. Kind of like a charm bracelet. When we go on a family trip we buy an ornament for our tree. So here's the process:

Ooh, look. Pretty undecorated tree.

Next the lights go on. We used both white lights and colored ones this year.

After that the red beads go up. My brother hates putting these on, but I think they look festive. And next the ornaments. As I mentioned, we usually don't have matching ornaments. But this year we decided to just put Disney ornaments up there and see how the tree filled out. As you can see it's pretty full. We've got a lot of Disney ornaments.

There's the mickey head glass balls, the Jim Shore 5 piece set (that's Goofy you see there),

and of course, all of my princess ornaments. That's like 7 of the ones on the tree right there.

So we decided to do something a little different and leave it there this year. It may not be bursting full of ornaments like some years, but I kind of like it. It's festive!

So how did you decorate your tree this year?