On the 7th day of Christmas my true love gave to me:

……a Christmas tree.  It seems like it’s not really Christmastime until we have the Christmas tree up and decorated.  In the past we have waited until mid-December to get our tree, but found that sometimes the best trees are gone by then, so now if we are in town we try to get it Thanksgiving weekend.  Oh, and I refuse to get an artificial tree!  Growing up we had both real and artificial trees (I remember a very groovy silver tree when I was very little), but I always liked the real trees better.    I even like the ritual of picking out the tree.  When we lived in New Jersey we always got our trees from a family-owned operation; they didn’t have the least expensive trees, but they were the best quality and I liked supporting a family business.   One year money was tight and we got a tree from one of those grocery store lots where every tree is $25; by the end of December there weren’t any needles left on the tree.   We never did that again!  Here’s my husband with the tree we bought this year:

As everyone knows who puts up a Christmas tree, each year we forget how much work is involved; somehow we think that we will be able to buy the tree, set it up, string the lights and decorate it all on the same day.  Wrong!  It is a multi-day process, at least in my house.  The first day we got the tree, wrested it into the house and put it in the water stand; that took about 2 hours.  I begged and pleaded my husband to put on the lights while I decorated the rest of the house.  But first we had to bring up all the decorations from the garage; that took an hour.  Luckily I had on my Ma-Gyver hat last year while packing everything away and the boxes were labeled, so I didn’t have to unpack every box to get what I needed.   Five years ago we decided to decorate with a new color scheme each year, so I have many boxes of decorations.  Packing them according to color was the smartest thing I did.  This year our color scheme is aqua blue, silver and white.  I had the house decorated a week before the tree:

It took two weekends for us to finish the tree (and by “us” I mean “me”; my husband was working and the kids started playing with a NY Giants football ornament and abandoned the tree decorating), but it was finally done.  Here’s the finished tree:

As you can see, the aqua blue, silver and white really doesn’t dominate the tree because in the 16 years that we have been married, we have accumulated many personal ornaments.    Every year each family member chooses a personal ornament either based on something that happened to them that year or simply an ornament that they like.  And we also try to get an ornament whenever we vacation in a new place; this year we bought an ornament in New Mexico that reminds us of our trip to Jane Fonda’s ranch.

I bought my ornament for this year; I love peace signs and it’s also representative of my blog, a big part of my life in 2009.  I already have a disco ball (another favorite and Funkidivagirl.com icon).

But I’m having the toughest time finding ornaments for my family this year!  They are requesting a sewing machine (my daughter is learning how to sew), Swiss mountains (my son was in a production of The Sound of Music) and DJ equipment (my husband live-streams/DJs from his computer most Friday nights).  Can they be any more difficult?  If you have any leads on where I can buy these ornaments, please let me know; I have looked everywhere in real life and online and can’t find anything.

What about you: do you have any traditions around decorating your house for Christmas?

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The 12 Days of Christmas by Funkidivagirl

On the 1st day of Christmas my true love gave to me….the words to the song.

On the 2nd day of Christmas my true love gave to me….Christmas cards.

On the 3rd day of Christmas my true love gave to me….Chili Dawg.

On the 4th day of Christmas my true love gave to me…..a Christmas vacation.

On the 5th day of Christmas my true love gave to me…..Santa Claus.