Our Christmas Tree!

Last week Ace Hardware was having a major sale on real Christmas trees. (Now that Thanksgiving is over I will talk about Christmas. I believe each Holiday deserves it's own spot-none of this creeping up on Halloween stuff that Christmas has been doing lately. Nuh uh. Back off and wait your turn, buddy). It's a long story-but my pre lit tree is in my sister's garage in Houston. You see, I was incredibly pregnant and trying to get the baby's room halfway set up, and the stupid tree was taking up more than half his room. My sister said she'd store it in her garage. She sent my brother in law to go get it. He had to move it to their garage. They moved two months later. He moved our tree to the new house. They moved again a couple months after that. He moved the tree to THAT house. Oddly enough, the house they moved it to is my parents. I had asked my Mom if I could store the tree there and she said, "It'll get packed when we move to China." Then she decided not to pack the garage attic. Where I was planning on storing the tree. So my brother in law moved the tree four times just for fun. Isn't he a nice guy? And he never complained once! Ha. So I got a tree last Saturday night for a steal of deal. When Jeff got home I said, "Can you get the tree out of the van?" He said, "I'll do it later." I must have reminded at least four times. The next day as we left church that was when I said, "I just really don't think it's good for the tree to be in the van. It's hot." That was when it clicked I'd bought a live tree. Whoops. It's a little brown now. But that definitely reminds me of our first Christmas together. We didn't have a tree. We had Christmas twigs. Oh Jefferson. Anyway, we put the baby to bed, enjoyed some quiet time and then decided to decorate the tree. It was so fun to pull out the usual cast of characters and laugh at the memories they brought. I love Christmas trees that have the big, beautiful matching ornaments. I think they're fabulous. But my favorite trees are the ones with ornaments like this. My niece made this for Jeff and I. Growing up our big tree was full of handmade and mismatched ornaments. Each ornament had a memory, and every year my favorite thing to do was find certain ornaments and relive where we got them from.

Jeff and I have a tradition-every year we pick out an ornament together that kind of "wraps up" an event of the year. This is our Christmas Pickle ornament. We forgot to buy one when we were in Europe in 2008, so we found a little German shop that imports ornaments and bought this one. It took me three seconds to find it. The bride and groom at the top is our first ornament that started the tradition. Do you put your star on last? We always had an angel growing up-but I fell in love with this star. What a perfect night. I love the Christmas season!