Oh Christmas Tree

For the past 2 years I have decorated 2 Christmas trees in our home. We have a tall artificial tree we place in front of the living room windows each year with all of our special ornaments on it and 2 years ago we purchased a tall skinny rustic looking tree to put in the dining room. This year after watching a Christmas movie together as a family, all 3 of us realized it had been 15 years since we put up a "real" tree and that we had never once all 3 gone out to choose and cut our tree together. So, we decided then and there to do that for this Christmas.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving we all got up and headed off to Tannenbaum Farms to choose a tree for the house, and also a tree for the church to decorate to display downtown in Central Park.



Here Marty is cutting the tree for our house:




And this is the tree we selected for the church:





After getting them wrapped and secured atop the Suburban we headed home to await decorations.


This is the church's tree decorated in Central Park:




I decided the real tree needed natural looking and homemade ornaments. Great concept, right?! But in reality, it meant a lot of work. Heather and I spent an entire evening making these ornaments. I spent time over the next few days attaching ribons to hang these and attaching ribbons to pine cones for the tree:


Here is the tree in the living room:


And here it is lit up:



I decided I couldn't bear not to have the regular tree up with all our special ornaments so I put it in the corner of the retreat off the master bedroom:



And then we have the tree in the dining room containing all the gingerbread and apple ornaments, among all the Santa Clause figurines:




Stay tuned for further Christmas festivities we've been checking out!