Ornamental

I love Christmas trees. They are the symbol of the holiday season to me.  They are the first thing that comes to mind when anyone mentions Christmas.

Childhood Christmas? We had a fake white tree with red decorations almost every year. Except that one time we had a real tree & spent a month stepping on dried needles.

Memorable Christmas? Taking a tour of the Oglebay Mansion Museum. They had about a half dozen trees decorated in the Victorian style with live candles.

Perfect Christmas decor? A 9 foot fir covered in lights and a hodgepodge of ornaments & a big bow & streamers on it.

I want a big tree. A big fake pre-lit tree. Live trees are a PITA to care for & if I touch them I break out in a rash. I want one of those 9 foot ones that are 4.5 feet across at the bottom. They are spendy but the real expense comes with the accessories, all the ornaments to cover it, the ribbons, the garland – mostly the new larger house with the high ceiling and huge room needed to hold the tree.

We’d have to take out some tiles in the drop ceiling and put one of the couches out of the porch to make room for a tree that big.

No one sits on the 3 seat sofa anyway.

We’ve had a small tree for about a decade now.  When we were first married we lived in an apartment & had a small live replantable  tree in bucket. Then we had a larger apartment & for a couple years got a ‘live’ tree from one of the Boy Scout tree shops ib the grocery store parking lot. When we bought the house we cut down a tree at a neighboring tree farm. But honestly, I don’t like cutting down trees, so we went back to replantable tree in a bucket. We could only afford small trees in buckets, 3ft on average. The year Havoc was born we bought a 3ft fiber optic tree & have had it ever since. It had the advantage of being able to be put out of reach.

But you can’t hang normal sized ornaments on it. The branches are not sturdy enough and the scale is all wrong.  The live trees were ok for normal sized ornaments sort of. When we got the fiber optic tree I packed up most of the ornaments. We hung the smaller ones on the tree, plus the ‘1st Christmas’ ones & left the rest in the box.

I love decorating our tree. I love so many of our ornaments have been with us for years and years. It’s like wrapping the tree in memories when we hang them. My favorite part of the holiday season is decorating the tree with the boys and telling them about the various ornaments, where they came from, who made them or why we bought them. And I’ve always been a bit sad that most of them never saw the light of day.

This year we have at last a full sized tree. Only 6.5 feet tall and 2.5 feet across but big enough for all of our ornaments, at least from a scale & weight point. We have a lot of ornaments. We have ornaments made or bought from DH’s childhood, from my childhood, wooden ones my mom painted, yarn ones my grandmother made and Hallmark ones I bought before the fiber optic tree came into our lives.

We hadn’t seen most of them in a decade.

Oh hello Princess

and the X-wing fighter!

This angel is from high school

This truck was on Dh’s tree from his birth until his mom passed away in 2001

Now that we have a tree that can support them I was able to get some  Keepsakes ornaments this year.

Santa sent us these ornaments with Elvin on Monday morning. I think it will be a tradition.

Havoc got Superman

Mayhem got Batman

And mom & dad got Luke’s Landspeeder

I’ve missed so many Star Wars ornaments since 1998!

This is the tree

We put up the small one as well because of scale issues again only the other way. You can’t see the small ornaments on the big tree.

Have you put your tree up yet? What are your favorite ornaments or Christmas decorations?