Christmas Crazy

When I was growing up we had two trees - one in our living room and one in our dining room, both of which were in big windows that faced the street. The one in the dining room had been my grandmother's tree and she LOVED red. The whole tree was decorated in red - red lights, red feather garland, red birds, red decorations. Some of her decorations were the craziest things I had ever seen. I loved that tree - it was garish, but I loved it! The living room tree was the family tree - the one with macaroni ornaments, personalized ornaments, souvenirs, multi-colored lights, etc. It was not a theme tree by any means. That's the kind of tree we have now - it's a giant tree and I don't have nearly enough stuff to fill it up, but almost every piece that goes on it has a story. We have a box with ornaments from various countries that David's mom collected for us when they were on vacation in 2001...a vacation they cut short when Kyle came early! My favorite is the Swedish girl...who I'm sure has a name...because she always reminds me of my friend Heather. We have ornaments from Disney World, one from Topeka, various penguin ones from years and years ago. The bows that go on top, which are missing at the moment because they need to be fixed, were made by my friend Tonya when I couldn't find anything I liked to go on the top of the tree. And of course now we have awesome ornaments that Kyle has made - with many more to come I'm sure.

I also have a small snowman collection which makes me laugh now that we live in Georgia! In fact today when we were watching College Gameday on ESPN I was shivering in empathy with all the fans at Arrowhead Stadium for the Kansas-Missouri football game tonight. It was misting, snowing and blowing all at once! It's a lovely day here!

Nope, my tree will never make the cover of "House Beautiful" but it's beautiful to me!