O Christmas Tree

First a picture of Simon, who tried to eat Beth's Indian hat, but had it backfire on him ~


Christy and I went out and bought Christmas trees (real of course) on November 30th. Rob and I put the tree in the stand that night, but told the kids they needed to have the playroom clean and their rooms clean before we decorated it. Nearly a week passed and Rob and I weren't sure we were ever going to get the tree decorated. Saturday evening though the kids got everything cleaned up, so Sunday after church we got out the decorations. I had already put the lights on, having had Rob stop buy the store and buy some as I remembered that all our colored lights stopped working last year. I opened the boxes and discovered 6 (!!!) sets of lights I had bought on sale last year after Christmas (note to self - check boxes before assuming you weren't organized enough to remember to buy them last year and even pack them in the Christmas boxes).

This year we could have had the tree down on the floor like "normal" people do, rather than up on the climber due to crawling children, however due to Simon's presence, we put it up on the climber again this year. We chose not to use any fragile ornaments this year as all four kids can climb the sides of the climber and most can even reach the top of the tree. As usual, I unwrapped the ornaments and the kids decorated the tree. They did a pretty good job this year! Usually we end up with 14 ornaments on each lower branch and none on the top ones.









Jack was not horribly interested in hanging ornaments on the tree, but he LOVED each ornament that made noise.


Don't know why this one turned out so fuzzy. We finished the tree by putting on candy canes and the angel tonight.


Usually we have the youngest child able to hold the angel put it on the top, but as we don't have any children younger than Jack, we went back to the beginning of the list and let Megan do it this year.


3 of my goofballs with the finished tree (Jack was behind the tree and didn't want to come out and be photographed) ~


I decorated the mantle and hung up the stockings as well. Since my whole family always comes here for Christmas, I have all the Alico stockings as well as each of ours. I love seeing them all hung up together. It makes me realize how lucky I am to have such a close family. This is the way it should be - everyone together for Christmas. We'll miss you Grandma and Grandpa Knowlton, Kate, Becca, Quincy, Cindy and Terry!