If a Tree Falls in the Den....

It's hard to see the forest for the trees around here lately. At the suggestion of fellow blogger DJkirkby and my Aunt-in-Law Caroline, here for your approval are our Christmas trees. I've mentioned before that I like to decorate for the holidays. I start with lights all over the house just after Halloween if I can schedule it. With the outside done, it's time to work on the inside. Lady Di and myself have collected a number of Christmas decorations over the years. Namely, ornaments. Every year we give the kids an ornament to mark the years. This tradition was started by my mother around twenty years ago. With this many new ornaments joining the old ones each year, we were running out of room on the tree.

That's when we said to ourselves, "Why not get another tree?" Then the next question asked was, "Why not a tree in every room?"

We started hitting the after-Christmas clearances at the hardware and department stores. You can usually make any offer for one of their leftover display trees, complete with ornaments and lights.

We decided to stop at five Christmas trees. Overboard you say? Well, we are only putting up three trees this year. This is a list of our Christmas trees for this year.

We can start with our 'kid' tree. Multicolored lights adorn this tree. This tree has all of our fun ornaments. It has Elmo, Darth Vader, Mr Spock, Lion King, Mickey Mouse and I can't remember what other cartoon characters. I think if you click on the picture you can find all of the above ornaments. It also has all of the kids' homemade ornaments. It has a few of Lady Di's and my ornaments from our childhood too. This is also our Ronald McDonald Home tree. Every year Gramma and Grampa Klein make a donation and Ronald sends us a nice gold heart. We support the Ronald McDonald Home in Sioux Falls, which we stayed in when Number One Son was born prematurely.

The next tree is our 'fancy' tree. This is decorated with gold and burgundy ornaments only. This tree is closely supervised by Lady Di. Although, two little elves seem to have rearranged it a bit. Lady Di has a good eye for color and what looks nice. White lights only for this tree.

Our third tree for this year is our angel tree. This is a four foot tree that I inherited from my Grandma Bernice. We wrap blue or sometimes turquoise lights on this upstairs tree. It is covered with dozens of crocheted angels made by Lady Di's Grandma Ollie. It has multiple other angels mixed with snow flake ornaments.

Grandma Ollie has made numerous beaded ornaments over the years. We have her ornaments on all three of our trees. We also have a box full of other ones she has made and we will maybe designate a tree for those next year.

This is another of Grandma Ollie's creations. It is a twelve inch, lighted tree made of beads and safety pins. She has also made beaded snowmen for us.

That's all for our indoor trees. We have a few nice looking evergreens outside too. They seem to look better with our blanket of new fallen snow too. Sorry for the poor photography.

That's pretty much it for our festive holiday trees. I know there are a lot of stories that every family has about their decorations. Tree ornaments seem to hold a specific Christmas memory for each one. And we will be adding ornaments and memories for many years to come.