Yet again, we headed off to a tree farm on this first weekend of December. Unlike last year, there was no snow on the ground, but the cold and wind more than made up for it in terms of the atmosphere. I don’t have any pictures from the tree farm because I was so cold. We waited around for a while for the tractor-driven cart to take us to this year’s cutting area, which worked out to our disadvantage. First of all, it was maybe a 4-minute walk away, so we froze more waiting for the ride than we would have had we just simply walked. Second, we ended up picking a different type of tree (a blue spruce) than our awesome fraser fir last year – because there wasn’t much choice for the fraser firs in the area where we got dropped off. However, of the drive back, we noticed a whole stand of tagged Fraser firs that we would have walked through had we walked – bah! Don’t get me wrong – the blue spruce is gorgeous and just barely fits in our living room – but as I was decorating it, I already missed the feather-soft needles of the fraser fir. Luckily, I hadn’t packed my gardening gloves away, so those certainly came in handy.
We started out with the tree away from the wall, since it’s a lot easier to wrap lights around it that way. Here is it before we did anything. The gap on the left side is going against the corner in the wall, so we didn’t worry too much about this imbalance in the tree when we picked it.
Dan helped me put the lights into the tree (although I’d like to buy a whole lot more strings for next year), and then took a nap.
I started with the larger individual ornaments, which I’ve been aquiring at 60-80% off post-boxing-day sales over the last few years. I love not being in a rush to get christmas ornaments! Refreshed from his nap, Dan even got up to help me with the last half of ornaments…
Oh wait, no, how could I forget – he kept napping, and by then Shakey had joined him too.
I filled in the gaps with more generic ornaments, and ta-dah! I was too lazy to pull out the tripod to show off both the lights and ornaments, so I’ll have to play with that later in the season. Notice that our tree is so tall this year (there is maybe 3-4″ between the top and ceiling?) that we opted to go without a tree topper. I kind of want to put a bird’s nest or something similar on top, but I think Dan will nix that idea.
By the end, I was feeling a little bit lazy, so I didn’t get much done in the way of trimmings. I got a few things up, and hopefully some trips to Michael’s will inspire me later this week.
I hope your decorating is going well, too!
