Oh, Christmas Tree(s)

I decided to toss out my old Christmas trees last year because every one of them had light issues. I thought I'd just start from scratch this year and as soon as I saw tree's being set up in the stores I started my search. I didn't want to just get any old tree though, I was searching for some specific's this year. I knew I wanted my living room tree to be no more than 9 feet (any taller is just too hard to decorate) and the ones for the kitchen and library to be no more than 7 feet. I wanted them to all be the slimmer type and have LED lights.

I ended up finding my big tree at Costco and my two smaller ones at Sams Club. I thought they had the best looking artificial trees at the absolute best prices and they fit what I wanted and had a few bonus features that were nice as well. The 9 foot tree came with a remote for changing the light functions. It has around 9 different light functions and can be all white lights, all colored lights or change between the two intermittently. The seven foot trees have the same light functions as the larger tree but no remote. The two smaller ones did come with storage bags though which is a nice bonus.

The day after Halloween I took all of our decorations down (mostly because it was a beautiful weather day to do it) and knew that I'd be setting up our Christmas stuff in the next few days. It's a lot of work to put it all up so I feel like we should enjoy it for more than a short 25 days. I put it up early and am ready for it all to be put away by New Years and it just works for me. Also, I wanted to put my trees up and make sure I liked them as much in my house as I did in the store as well as check that all the lights worked! What a nightmare it would be to get a new tree, set it up to find out the lights weren't working!

Dakota and I put up the "white house" tree in the library first. I have so many years of the white house ornaments that they get their own tree! I fill it out with silver and blue balls and a few strands of beaded garland.

Putting trees up is a lot of work. First you have to clean the area the tree will be going in and then lug the tree up from the basement, assemble it, then lug up all the ornaments, decorate the tree and then put away all the extras. It's very time consuming and to do this one tree took a couple hours which meant I was in no mood to start another one right away. So, it wasn't until the next day that I was ready to tackle tree number two; kitchen tree.

This is probably my favorite one because it has a bunch of wacky ornaments on it. Most of them are glass and expensive but they're bright colors and random, fun objects. Since my tree is now 7 feet instead of the 5 I had originally, I needed a bunch of new ornaments to fill it out. Luckily, when I went to Michaels, the ornaments were 50% off and I had a coupon that was 30% off total purchase including sale items; so they were a steal!

   

   

   

   

The kitchen tree isn't quite done as I haven't found the tree topper yet, so no final tree pictures until I find it. And, the living room tree is set up as of this afternoon but not decorated. I'm hoping we'll be able to put the decorations on it tomorrow when everyone is home. I'll tell you what though, that tree is HEAVY! It comes in 5 separate tree sections and each section must weigh a good 30 pounds! But, I wrestled that thing together and it looks pretty nice even without the decorations.