Oh, Christmas Tree

Ever since Ross and I have been married, we've had a fake, pre-lit Christmas tree. It has been handy, and it looks good. We liked the simplicity of it - open the box, unfold the branches, wrap a ribbon around it (I skipped ornaments because it took too long), and plug it in. Voila, a beautiful tree with no mess. 15 minutes to set it up.

So why would I want to complicate things and throw a real tree into the mix? Because we have kids, of course, and we are responsible for forming glorious memories for them.

But before we went to pick out our real tree, we brought out the old trusty fake tree and put it up in the kitchen. It was our warm-up tree. Also, we aren't using the ribbon this year because it became tangled during that 15 minute set up time I was bragging about earlier.


Thanks to Ross' family (Aunt Nancy and Grandma Vickie) for being the sole providers of all the ornaments on our trees. Nancy and Leo gave Ross an ornament every year when he was a child, and even gifted us some ornaments the first few years after we were married, so it was fun to take them out of all their boxes, plus see a little piece of Ross' Christmas history. Vickie had them all packaged up so it was easy as could be to add them to our little tree. It also appears we've inherited some of Ross' brothers' - Chad and Kyle's - ornaments. If you want them, guys, lemmeknow.

Nora added her own ornament that she made last year. For some reason she was drawn to this one.

The kids helped pick out the best looking, best smelling Fraser Fir I've ever seen.

It's up in our living room now and waiting to be decorated! It was totally worth it.