Aren't these cards cute?! Yes, there are two of them, pictured side-by-side. My daughter L made one for my husband and one for me for Christmas. They are out of paper and she just cut them out and created them freehand (no templates or drawing them out). I thought the two cards looked great together. L has a real talent.
These cute snowmen preface my yearly Christmas tree/decoration blog post. Sigh. Stop now if you can't take it again. :0) I will start with a couple of decorations I have not shown before.
Here is a collection of Christmas chachkes that L grouped on this table in the front hall and I thought it looked very nice, particularly the Santas on the top shelf.
Here is my white Christmas tree that has just been missing something this year. Poor tree. Those kinds of dilemmas drive me crazy, so I have been trying to diagnose the tree's design problems for the past month. I am still not sure what the trouble is other than the ornaments I used on here last year went back on the "sparkly tree" where they originally belonged and this tree suffered for it. I will try again next year. The idea with this tree is/was to put up the ornaments and tree skirt I remember from my childhood. We even purchased "bubbler" lights last year to compliment the look and the garland is something I inherited that probably even predates my childhood. However, there are not a lot of those ornaments remaining from my long ago childhood and so I included other things to complete the look. This year, I kept adding other things in a effort to fix the look, until it was a homely hodge podge tree. Ah well. I love first world problems like this.
This year, B bought a live pine garland for the front hall. We put little birds, pine cones, snow flakes and little ball ornaments all along it. Something gets lost in the photography--sorry to say--because this was really cute in person.
Here is my German tree--so tall. As usual, it is up on a table so the dog cannot reach the $wooden$ $ornaments$. Every year, when putting the ornaments on the tree, I feel as if I am seeing old friends again--inanimate friends but friends nonetheless. L laughed at me last year because I kept saying, "Oh, here is my favorite ornament. Oh, that is my favorite angel! This is my favorite shaved wood ornament. Here is my favorite handmade ornament! Here is my favorite . . . ! " You get the picture. I was actually being pretty specific but to her it sounded like every ornament was my favorite. :0) Maybe they are! There are ornaments B and I bought for our first Christmases together, such as some we bought on our honeymoon, that are fun to see again There are some my mother bought for me in Rotenburg at the end of my LDS mission and some she bought for me when I was still single and my own Christmas tree was YEARS away from happening. There are ornaments some dear friends brought back to me from their travels to Germany. I could go on and on. Because of this attachment to everything, I enjoy decorating this tree myself, although I will never turn down help. I wonder who will decorate this tall tree from a ladder once I am aged! I doubt other people my age worry about this but I have seen in my mother what is down the road for me, no doubt. Anyway, this tree felt "just right" this year.
Here is the "sparkly tree"--The reason it is called the sparkly tree is that decorations have to be sparkly to go on there. I did not put it up last year (hence more ornaments to put on the white tree!) because it is usually in the living room. We do not go in there much and this tree is too much work to decorate and then just shut it up in a room and not enjoy it. So we moved it to the family room. That was a great idea and I got a lot of enjoyment out of being able to see it during the holiday season. Believe it or not, I even added some ornaments to this "collection" this year--steep sale prices + cute ornaments = "I must buy these." This is the tree that my children associate with Christmas--the tree Santa usually uses--so it was nice to see this tree in action once again. The bow on the top and the ribbon around the tree are both from a Christmas tree at my wedding reception and the golden "spikes" sticking up around the bow are from my bridal bouquet from several decades ago. There are a lot of memories associated with these ornaments and their acquisition/origins, too.
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As for decorations outside, we received an award from the city for "best use of lights" for this year. The kids and I kept joking with my husband about his "major award" that he was going to receive and that it may just be a lamp in the shape of a leg in a fishnet stocking ala the movie "The Christmas Story." However, it turned out to be a certificate. Whew! The kids and B had done all the work but B and I publicly accepted the certificate--I felt like a pretender! As usual, we like to leave these lights up through most of January. I am never quite ready to take down the Christmas decorations, inside or out, so the indoor trees will stay up for a while longer, too. January can really feel like the winter doldrums after the sparkles of December, so why not lengthen out the magic?!
