Snowy Sunday.

What a wonderful snowed-in day we enjoyed. We slept in, stayed in our PJ's, worked on Christmas projects, watched sappy Lifetime Christmas movies, and napped. After dinner, we decorated our tree. The kids enjoyed looking at all the ornaments and hearing the stories about how old they were when each ornament was purchased, which ornament represents which important life experience, etc. We select ornaments yearly for our family, for Matt and I as a couple, and for each of the kids, so our tree really represents our lives. And we have lots of little frame ornaments on the tree with photos of each of our Christmases, so decorating is always nostalgic. The tree decorating, however, did not go without incident this year. One minute, we were finishing up hanging the ornaments ( of course, a lot of them were on the lower branches on one side, making the tree's weight unevenly distributed) and the next.....the tree was laying on top of my 4-year-old son. Thankfully, he wasn't hurt.... just very surprised.....and after the cleanup of all the broken ornaments and loose needles, we are as good as new. The photo below shows a little bit of the shower of ornaments and needles that graced our carpet. None of our important ornaments were broken, and most importantly, Hayden is fine. It is just one of those things to make the night more memorable! Of course, I'm not sure my husband sees it that way, as he spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to secure the tree so it doesn't happen again. Funny, we paid 55.00 for this tree, and we usually try to stay under 20.00. In fact, our first few years of marriage, we purchased natural (unpruned, unpainted) trees from a family in our little town for less than 10.00 (they just cut them out of their yard!), and it was great. This year's tree--which was supposedly a new breed that is soft and won't lose it's needles--has been nothing but problems so far. But it is up and we will hope that it will be fine from here through the new year.

As we were getting out the ornaments, we realized that we threw our lights out with last year's tree (they were so tangled, we decided not to mess with trying to take them off). So, me and the kids headed off to Walgreen's to get new lights. Bonus, they were on sale 4 packs for 10.00. Now, I am typically a white lights woman through and through, but my son was adament that we needed to buy the multi-colored lights. So, in the end, we compromised. I told him we could get one package of colored lights for the tree in the front library room, and white lights for the big tree in the family room. After I got the colored lights on, he was so happy. And I must admit, the color adds a festive touch.

Tomorrow, I will share some of the Christmas projects I have been working on. Until then.....sweet 9-days-until-Christmas dreams!