DECORATING THE TREE

What fun we had decorating our tree.....the whole experience of our Christmas tree was a gift to me. My favorite Christmas tradition is putting up the tree and decorating it while playing Christmas music.....everyone singing along.....it just feels like Christmas! Normally I like to put up the tree the Friday after Thanksgiving so that we have it for the entire Christmas season. This year however we were sick at Thanksgiving and I just couldn't make our "deadline".

First of all, we hadn't found a tree yet by the time Thanksgiving weekend rolled around. I was concerned about buying an artificial tree (they're expensive these days and then we'd have to figure out where to store it in our already-full 2 bedroom apartment!). But our first Christmas gift came in the form of a Christmas tree. Our friends were going out of town for the month of Christmas and were gracious enough to let us borrow their tree!!! Yay!! No money and no worries about storage!! Perfect!!

We left for Chrstmas vacation in Georgia 1 1/2 weeks before we originally planned and so we didn't get the tree up before we left! Oh no!! I assumed that we'd return home as scheduled on Christmas eve to an apartment with no decorations to lift our Christmas spirits but my husband had other plans. Chris KNOWS how special the Christmas tree is to me and so he arranged for our friends to get the key to our apartment and set up our Christmas tree so that when we arrived home at 10:00pm christmas eve we'd have our very own Christmas tree awaiting us! How thoughtful!! I LOVED it and he truly surprised me!! (not that it's hard to surprise me, I don't pick up on any clues!).

So we had our first Christmas day with just the four of us and presents surrounding the tree on Christmas morning when the kids awoke! What a gift!

Now, since we got home so late and I was too tired to climb the ladder to get out the Christmas decorations on Christmas eve, we never did decorate other than the lights. Caleb decided a few days after Christmas that we needed to decorate. So we searched through our craft supplies and found rings that we could use to make paper ornaments.....it was perfect!! The kids had so much fun decorating the tree and it only took 20 minutes ......AND I didn't even have to climb a ladder!! What fun!

Here we are......



Jingle Bells (which the kids call "tinkerbells") is the kids' favorite song so we must have played it 12 times in a row before convincing them that there are other Christmas songs!!!



The kids were great about sharing the stool to reach the high spots.....as always we set the timer and when it beeped it was time to switch!



Alethia loved wearing her new dress for the event!




Success!! The tree is decorated!