Trimming the Tree

Deric, Sarah and I decorated our Christmas tree the Saturday after Thanksgiving. One box for the tree and one box of ornaments brought in from the garage, and we were in business. Its a pre-lit tree from Target, so decorating took no time at all. 

 Our decorations consist mostly of ornaments from Target: the simple ones that come in the tubes, plus some I got during the after-Christmas clearance. Sarah was taking a picture of me showing off the ornaments when Deric swooped in. I love him. :)

I just love his face in this picture. He thinks he's so funny!

(I think he's pretty funny, too.)

Besides our generic ornaments, Deric's got quite a few ornaments from his childhood--mostly the ones he received from his grandparents.

By far the fanciest ornament on our tree is from an ornament swap I went to this past week. It puts all our other ornaments to shame!

I love the way our tree looks this year, but I'll be glad to replace the generic ornaments with handmade ones over the years. Growing up, our tree was full of handmade ornaments-- baby Jesus with our fingerprint as his head, pictures of us framed with red or green construction paper, and so on. 

With some help from Pinterest, I played around with the settings on my camera to get some fun pictures once it got dark. Apparently, we've got quite a gap in lights right smack in the middle of our tree but I'd never noticed until I took this picture, so we won't worry about that.

As we decorated, we watched Elf for the first time this season. What better movie to spread Christmas cheer? ;)

"The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear!" (Or in my case, to put up pretty decorations, 'cause no one wants me singing loud!)