Christmas trees....present and past

We finally decorated Graeme's first Christmas tree last night. We started the process a week ago when we pulled out our beautiful prelit Christmas tree, set it up, plugged it in and the bottom half didn't light. Wes and I both worked on the lights changing fuses and bulbs.. no luck it still didn't light. So with the busy week ahead the tree sat until the cancellation of Lily's Nutcracker performance yesterday. Have you ever tried to take lights off of a prelit tree? It took me over 20 minutes to remove one strand of the lights. So after some not so nice words said under my breath and dealing with the scratches on both hands, a new plan was devised. I just put new lights on top of the ones that weren't working. Otherwise, this tree would not get decorated until next year.

People ask if he smiles like this all the time and yes, pretty much he does. His preschool teacher sent a note home that they are amazed that the muscles in his face don't hurt from smiling.

Lily also enjoyed decorating the tree!

He worked so hard to find the perfect spot for each ornament.

As a result, the bottom of the tree is definately more decorated than the top.

Lily had to sneak and rearrange a lot of his ornaments. Too Funny!

We all had a good time.

This morning I grabbed the camera to take a pic of our tree and Graeme jumped off the couch and posed. He is so proud of his tree.

So I was already feeling nostalgic about decorating Graeme's first tree. We continue to decorate it with flowers that were used at our wedding reception (13 years ago). Then I saw the Christmas tree post on my bloggy friend, Cora's blog and it just got me thinking of Christmas trees past.

Years ago, I dated someone briefly that worked on a Christmas tree farm. He convinced my family that we had to have a live tree. Thus the tradition started. I would go with my Dad and the dogs to the farm to find the perfect tree. Dad always wanted to get the tree that the dogs "blessed" with their "attention". This produced some pretty strange looking trees over the years. I still love the smell of a fresh tree and it reminds me of these trips with Dad.

One year when I was in college, we needed two trees...one for the family house and one for my apartment. After we got home, we put the tree in the backyard until we were ready to decorate it. At some point on this windy day, the tree was blown into the swimming pool. I looked out and told Dad but he simply stated that maybe it needed a drink of water. I went out to fish it out of the pool. Mom came home from shopping and we all decorated the tree but never mentioned to her what had happened. A week later the needles started to fall off of the tree and by Christmas....well, it was the biggest, brownest Charlie Brown tree I ever saw. Mom commented that she could not figure it out because the tree at my apartment looked so nice and green. Years later we finally told her what had happened. I love the memories of those "special" times with Dad! Thanks Cora for reminding me of the trees of my past!