It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas!

When we first got married, our tree was meticulous, Victorian...pristine. We carefully made perfect bows with burgundy, velvet, brocade ribbon and evenly spaced them on the tree with their ends, trailing like streamers, to the next bow. We filled in between with antique gold lace. Our ornaments were all gold and ivory - Victorian angels with harps, angels with bells, angels just flying. It was picture perfect.

But then the kids come. They start coming home from Sunday School each week with a new "ornament." - a picture they drew and drizzled glitter all over....a photo of themselves inside a paper bell....a foam manger scene all glued together or a Popsicle stick stable. They proudly march in to hang it in the middle of your pristine, picture-perfect, Victorian tree. It doesn't match. You try to move their ornaments to the back, assuring them that it is really empty back there and could use their decorations....but soon you have 56 of these precious ornaments, and the back of the tree can no longer contain them.

That was the year, I resolved to let the kids take over. We strung popcorn. We strung cranberries. We hung candy canes and all of their handcrafted ornaments...and all the ones Bill and I had collected growing up. It wasn't perfect or pristine, but it was full of love.

As the years have gone by, I can't imagine going back to "my tree." This one is so much prettier. One of my favorite memories is of Hayden sitting by the tree at 13 mos old, and chewing on the popcorn strands. (Some day I will post more old pictures. My old pictures are better anyway, since I had a better camera. However, they are all trapped in the downstairs computer without a working monitor.)

I so wish I could capture the beauty of the lights on a tree. I really believe this is by far our prettiest tree ever.