Oh Christmas Tree!

We (finally) put up our Christmas tree tonight.  We always wait until after Walton's birthday -  December 4th -to decorate our tree but this year we are much later than usual.  This has been a busy week with something going on every evening until tonight.  We were all glad to have a night at home.  We ordered a pizza (actually our days of ordering a single pizza are over - we now order 2 plus breadsticks & our  teenagers wolf it down), hauled the tree & ornaments up from the basement, put on some Christmas music, & got to work.

Kyle put together the tree & adjusted the branches.  He is very particular about getting it just right.

 Walton happily left the task to Kyle - he likes Christmas, but not decorating for Christmas.  (Grinchy!) His job was to entertain Anslie while the boys & I got the ornaments on the tree.  She was very entertained by trying to put one of her pink hairbows in his hair.

 Handsome Will waiting for Kyle to tell us the tree was ready -

 He wanted Anslie to put the first ornament on the tree

 so he helped her do it.

 This is the only decoration Walton helped with - Kyle may pass him in height by next Christmas!

 Since we sold our Pine Tree house, we've had an artificial tree.  The year we lived in a rental while we were building, we bought a huge tub of assorted silver ornaments since our family ornaments were in storage.  Walton thought it was the prettiest tree we'd ever had.  We set the silver tree up in our foyer the first two years here in our new home & put the tree with family ornaments upstairs in the bonus room.  To me, the silver tree was pretty but it wasn't special.  So this year, I decided we would put the family ornaments on the downstairs tree again where we could enjoy them every day.  The boys & I enjoyed putting all of our old favorites on the tree.  Here are some of them:

My best childhood friend Lisa gave us this wreath the first year we were married.

 A kindergarten classic - the popsicle stick Rudolph.

 We have a whole batch of these hand painted wooden ornaments.  My Grandma W. painted them for me in December 1971.  You can barely see her inscription on the bow & bloomers of this Grandma ornament.  My brother Allen has a set also.

 A few of the wooden ornaments show teeth marks from our precious family dog, Skippy.  She was a model of obedience, discipline, & loyalty.  (My family will laugh out loud when they read this!  I hope my sarcasm is evident!)  Skippy would grab an ornament & run to hide under the bed while she gnawed on it.  It was charming.

 Anslie is thinking of doing the same thing that Skippy did. 

 We have ornaments from when the boys were tiny...

Ornaments from family vacations...

 Ornaments the boys made in school with some of the same talented teachers I'm privileged to work with each day at Ola Elementary...

 Ornaments that commemorate "firsts" in the boys' lives - this one was for Kyle's first hunting trip with Walton...

 ...and this one was for Will's first snowman, which he built when we visited my parents in IL in 2000.

 Here is our finished tree - I need to get out my "stunt presents" which are just empty boxes wrapped up to camouflage the scrawny tree trunk & electrical cord.  Time to run - Anslie is systematically removing all of the ornaments she can reach.  I have some teaching to do!