Christmas Tree Decorating

Earlier this week, it was time to pick out and decorate our beautiful Christmas tree. We have an artificial one but Jay insists that we get a real tree if we are going to be home for Christmas day. So, after a long day of travel on Saturday, we got out in the bitter cold on Sunday and bought our 13 foot tree from the Boy Scouts. One of my favorite things during the Christmas season is going to pick out a tree as a family. I also really love getting all of the ornaments out every year. They truly hold many memories for me. For example, I know you are all tired of hearing about Disney but this year we added some Mickey Mouse ears to our tree to commemorate our trip. In the years to come, whenever I see that ornament it will always remind me of our wonderful vacation. Every other ornament on the tree holds some special meaning just like that one and it is so fun to take a trip down memory lane, especially at this time of year.

Anyway, this is the first year that I let the kids take their own ornaments and hang them on the tree themselves. What craziness!!! Audrey, in all of her enthusiasm could hardly get any of hers on the tree because the anticipation of the next box opening was just too much for her to handle. Reed basically just wanted to play with his Thomas & Percy ornaments that my mom gave him a few years ago. And Lauren, well let's just say, was in the middle of it all!

I took a picture of what the kids did. This is a close up shot so you could see everything, but just imagine, the rest of the tree is empty! It looked really funny for a while until Mama came in and shuffled things around...just a bit... and then added all the breakable ornaments up high. I'll post a picture of our tree when we are totally done. I just have a few finishing touches to make.

Audrey brought home a little writing assignment the other day. She said that they were supposed to answer the question "What would you do if you were a reindeer?" This is what she wrote. (She had no help to spell the words...they want them to try to sound things out for themselves.) The translation is below...

Audrey said "I would fly all day and night today to Santa."

Just thought it was cute and wanted to share.