o, christmas tree!

we have had a great time decorating our tree this year. my preference is to pick out our tree the friday or saturday after thanksgiving so that we can enjoy it as long as possible... well, that was our plan this year and was even on ethan's countdown chart but the days were numbered before our disney trip, and i knew i'd want to take time to enjoy getting the tree just right! so we waited till we got home, and i'm so glad we did. there were fewer trees to choose from, but ethan did a great job helping us find a good one. (he heard me tell brian, "this one looks full", so he went around touching all the trees saying, "yis one yooks full! yis one yooks full!") he had even more fun helping us get the lights out. we have 2 strands of lights that have 16 different functions... a little overkill if you ask me, but boy oh boy did our little boy have fun pushing those buttons a thousand times!!! (see picture to the left...) we got alllll the lights on the tree and decided to put up the ornaments the next day. i'm SO GLAD we waited because the next day, i noticed that the bottom strand of lights were only working intermittently.... and then they went out completely. i guess they'd had enough of a workout with ethan the night before! so we took all those lights out and planned to use the LED lights that brian had bought earlier in the season. i then realized that they didn't twinkle, and i really wanted twinkly lights... so we took his LED lights BACK to target but discovered that they didn't have LEDs that twinkle.... so brian lovingly agreed that we could get non-LED twinkly lights (that were also a fraction of the price of LED lights for twice as many!) we took the time to put the red twinkle bulbs every so often in the lights to make them twinkle, and then we put them on the tree. let me just say that "twinkle" was a little bit of a false advertisement!! a better description would have been "flash on and off in strips, leaving most of your tree to look dark at any given moment". they blinked in sections. how dumb is that! i was so disappointed, but i knew i was stuck with these lights at least for this year. so my sweet, patient husband helped me find all the red blinky bulbs (with the lights already on the tree) and replaced them with the regular bulbs... so now we have non-twinkly, non-LED lights, and frankly, it's not what either of us wanted! but it's pretty, and i'd already almost forgotten about all that until brian brought it up today. i have pledged to my wonderful husband that we will have LED lights on our tree next year! and i will be looking for bonafide twinkly ones!!! (for the record, i was going to leave the whole lights fiasco part out of this post, but i made the mistake of reading this to brian, and he made me tell this silly story....)

ok, back to decorating our tree... before i put up all the ornaments, i decided it was time to purge my ornament collection. i have so many sentimental ornaments that i will never ever get rid of, and then i have my "worked at family christian stores for years and bought way too many ornaments at 80% off in february" collection. it was time for most of those to go. they were nice, but i decided that we needed to make room for the growing ornament collections of our children, not to mention all the popsicle stick creations that will donn our tree before too long! brian did not believe me when i told him that i was getting rid of 38 ornaments!!!! i shared some with friends before donating the rest, and it felt so good to downsize a little! with all of that said, now i'll share our NEW ornaments this year... :) but first, here is our tree this year...



our family ornament is a gingerbread cinderella's castle from our recent disney trip. i saw this our first night at downtown disney, and i'm so glad i found it because i never did see another ornament that i liked. i love this one because it represents our wonderful disney trip but doesn't scream "DISNEY!!!"... it still kind of goes with the overall vintage theme of my tree. ethan's ornament for this year is a "happy birthday jesus" cake with a candle on top that lights up. he is very very into birthdays this year and loves talking about whose birthday is coming up. we have been teaching him that Christmas is the celebration of Jesus' birth, and he has fun singing happy birthday to baby Jesus. :) he loves this ornament, and one of the first things out of his mouth after i gave it to him was, "don't put it on the tree!" yes i realize there's a pine needle on the cake in the picture, but it's christmas eve and i have way too much to do today to retake this picture!! :) i searched long and hard for caroline's ornament this year. currently, her favorite christmas song is "deck the halls". she has been doing this noisy thing with her tongue that sort of resembles "lalala", so we started singing "falalalala" whenever she made this noise. she quickly learned to wait through "deck the halls with boughs of holly" and to only do her little tongue thing whenever we got to "falalalala". i have still yet to get this on video, but it's pretty funny. so i was determined to find a musical "deck the halls" ornament. the best i could do was this little plastic hallmark music box ornament. when you open the little drawer, the girl dances around the tree & the song plays. it will be fun to tell her this story as she grows older! what's almost as funny is to hear ethan say in one breath, "caroyine say deck a halls a vows a hah-yee, bayayayayayayayaya!" when he was in nursery last week, he exclaimed this to our friend katie, and with his added stuttering at the beginning of "caroyine", katie was slightly concerned that he was having stroke! oh dear!

i took some fun pictures of the kids with their ornaments today after church, so i'll post those soon...