Christmas Trees, Stories & Love!!!!!!

Christmas trees say a lot about people, they hold a lot of history, and they tell stories. They don’t hold history just because they are chopped down when they are many years old, but because the family that they belong to decorates them in their own unique way that always brings stories to the surface.

My Christmas tree tells a love story–not really but kind of. Phil and I have been decorating Christmas trees together since we started dating in college, so since 2006. That is 9 Christmas trees, WOW! We did not live together in college but Phil acquired a small artificial tree from his sister (I think) and we use to set it up in his room and decorate it every year. We even wrapped empty boxes and set them up under the tree as “presents”. *side note: we still set this tree up every year too!!!* Since we were broke college students we did not rush out to the store to purchase a multitude of ornaments to decorate this tree, we simply “made” our own ornaments. We used a commerce bank keychain, a rubber bracelet Phil got at a race, safety pins with jingle bells, a stress ball shaped like a star, ect. We still have and use the listed items for our tree. I often think of leaving them in the box because they are ridiculous but they are a part of us and our story. We had some regular ornaments that we probably borrowed or inherited but we didn’t buy ornaments. Well…..actually, I bought a few ornaments and gave them to Phil as gifts each Christmas. By the time we got married and moved in together in 2010 we had a total of maybe 5 nice ornaments that we I purchased and a box of nonsense ornaments that we loved. When we got married we obviously received the “Our First Christmas” ornament so we added that to our collection. I don’t even know who got that for us but Thanks! We LOVE Christmas and now next time we have to go to a wedding I’ll be less awkward when it comes to gift buying because I’ll be getting the couple an “Our First Christmas” ornament since I think it was a great idea. People also just gave us ornaments as gifts or because they no longer needed them. Then we started buying ornaments every time we went on vacation, with the exception of our last trip to Colorado because we forgot. When we are on vacation we look for specialty Christmas shops that are open all year and go in and each pick out an ornament. We have a decent amount of these ornaments now. These are what I consider to be nice ornaments. They are only hung at the top of the tree because of the cats. The generic Christmas balls are hung on the bottom of the tree incase a cat swats at them and knocks them off. They are also hung with string not hooks incase a cat swats at them this way we don’t have to worry about the possibility of  a hook in a paw. Luckily, after the first year the cats haven’t climbed the tree. *Knock on wood*  Basically, the majority of our non-generic ornaments tell a part of our “story”. I could look at the tree and tell our “love story” a story. It may be a love story, if its not I would probably try to turn it into one because I think everything is a love story like in the movies even if it is something as simplistic as drinking coffee on a Tuesday morning……..

Other parts of the tree contribute to the history of the family and the story as well. Phil loves colored lights. I prefer white lights because I always admired how perfect my Grandmother’s tree looked with white lights when I was a child. Sometimes in relationships you need to compromise though, we have 1 strand of white lights and the rest are colored lights. You can barely see my white lights because they are overpowered by Phil’s colored lights but they are there and one day his lights will burn out and I will go to the store and buy lights (white lights) to replace them and then when my lights burn out he can go to the store and buy more colored lights to replace them. Our tree also has ribbon wrapped around it. Incase you don’t know I LOVE ribbon. I have an affinity for ribbon. If I see ribbon in a craft store I HAVE to buy it. Naturally, when we moved into our hose and I found myself lacking decorations I went to the store and bought Christmas ribbon and wrapped it around the tree. I also bought strands of beads and wrapped those around the tree, I don’t know why. I do know that every year we have things to add to the tree just like every year we add pages to our story.