CHRISTMAS TREE!

To lighten the mood around here...lets take a look at our newly up Christmas tree.


We have a pre-lit artificial tree, well....actually pre-lit is an exaggeration. It USED to be pre-lit, but now 9/10 of the lights are burned out. We got this tree when I was pregnant with Makayla. I loved it so much. It is one of those high quality trees, with all of the lights tightly interwoven in the branches, the strands are clipped on to the tree and when it was new and all the lights worked, it was breathtaking. However for the last three years we have had to add more lights every year. Sitting down to remove all of the lights from the branches would take days and more time and patience than I possess. Instead we bought lights and put them on the tree with the burnt out strands. It was not terribly noticeable until last year when all 8 pre-lit strands were out and so it was fairly obvious that there were 800 burned out bulbs on the tree under the 600 or so that we had put on in replacement.

So anyway...this year we decided (we being the kids and I) that we would get a small real tree and make all of the ornaments and decorations. So I popped pop-corn, bought fresh cranberries and the ingredients needed to make cinnamon and salt dough ornaments.


We spent days stringing pop corn and cranberries, you see here Cameron eating the pop-corn intended for the garland. It kind of went like this; one for the garland, five for Cameron, one for the garland, three hand fulls and 15 minutes of Spongebob for Cameron.



Finally the garlands were done and we put them in a "safe" place. Safe until Olivia woke up from her nap. She then proceeded to pick the pop-corn from the garland and eat it until I hid the strands from her grubby little fingers.



We spent nearly a week making, baking and painting salt-dough and cinnamon ornaments. They were fun for us all.



Then on Sunday we went to get the tree. We had originally decided on a small tree so our ornaments would look good, however we had MA with us and in his opinion, bigger is better, so we ended up with a 61/2 foot tree and our few ornaments and garlands only covered a small portion of the tree. So along with our few home made ornaments we also have some of our regular ornaments too. The tree turned out well...oh and hey...we did not have to buy any lights....we already had 600 waiting to be used!

The kids waiting to decorate the tree

The finished product!