Of Trees and Tree Skirts

I'm all about traditions over here, especially when they involve Christmas!  Just ask my husband.  He discovered this little quirk of mine right before we got married.  Since we married at the end of November, the holiday season was already upon us when we said "I do!"  I think he was under the impression that I was a blank slate when it came to "how the holidays should be celebrated."  Hmm!  Boy, was he surprised!

I won't bore you with all my quirky holiday "musts," but a couple of them are 1)You must decorate for Christmas immediately after Thanksgiving, preferably the very next day, 2) You must go to a tree farm and physically cut down your own tree, and 3) You must hang Christmas lights on the outside of your house (to be turned on the day after Thanksgiving)!

Thankfully, Chris has gone along reasonably agreeably with these "musts."  In fact, he added the tradition of cutting down the tree on his birthday, which isn't always possible to do, but we try.  To the traditions we brought into our marriage we have since added a few of our own.  One of those is that whenever and wherever we go on vacation, we need to bring back a Christmas ornament to remember the time.  Because of this, we have things like scorpions, buffalo, ocean freighters, lighthouses, and seashells on our tree.

In addition, all of the kids have certain ornaments that are special to them, so when we decorate the tree there is a specific order of things.  It is a major offense to put up an ornament "belonging" to someone else!  Okay, maybe not, but they do like to hang their ornaments  :-)

A few years back we started the tradition of putting the kids' hand prints on our tree skirt (an idea from Family Fun magazine).  It has been very fun watching their hand sizes grow over the years.  Two years ago our first hand tree skirt filled up and (gasp) it has taken me this long to make a new one :-(  Here is the old one...



I don't have a picture of the new one yet because I'm not done with it :-(  I ran out of paint, so I haven't put the pets' paw prints on it yet.  The only downside to the custom tree skirt thing is that I can't give away or throw away our old skirts, so what do I do with them?  By the time the kids are grown and gone I will have at least three (maybe four) tree skirts!  (we fill them up pretty quickly with eight hands, especially as those hands get larger)  Ahh well, they will bring back many memories each year as I unpack them with the Christmas stuff on the day after Thanksgiving!