O' Christmas Tree.....

I love my Christmas tree! I love decorating it, the smell of it, and sitting in the family room with all the lights off -- except for the twinkling lights of the tree.

My Marine's family had a tradition of doing a different theme for their tree every year. When My Marine and I got married, we thought we'd carry on the tradition. Our first Christmas tree theme was blue & silver, the second tree was all music, and our third tree was all Santa Claus. But somehow we never made it past the Santa Claus theme. One - we were running out of storage room and two - we just LOVED the Santa theme. So we kept it.

The year My Marine was deployed in Iraq, I had to decorate the tree by myself. Nani was just a year old -- she wouldn't remember whether we had a tree or not, but I had to do it. That was the year the ornaments changed. Instead of Santa, I did a variety of ornaments. Ornaments that had meaning. And it stayed. So now the theme of our tree is family history.

As we put the ornaments on our tree, we remember what each ornament is for.

Our wedding ornament. It's always the first one we unwrap and put on the tree.


The angel has Nudge's name on it and the "Princess" ornament is for Nani


The Santa ball is one of the originals left over from the Santa themed tree


The little gold angel was given to Nani by my daddy right after she was born. It's special because her name is misspelled on it -- and we still laugh about it to this day.

This ball is a Russian ornament that we got from a little Russian store during our travels. The rest of the set are scattered throughout the tree.



I love this one! We bought this one right after My Marine returned from Iraq. He had said - "Wouldn't it be nice to have snow for Christmas?" -- especially after living in 100+ degree days for 18 months. From his mouth to God's ear -- it snowed every weekend between Thanksgiving and New Year's. We had a blizzard every weekend and when it was all said and done -- we had almost 5 feet of snow total!

There are so many more ornaments on our tree that have special meaning -- the ones that Nani handmade, a few that were handed down from My Marine's mom, the ones we bought as we traveled, and the German Shepherd ornament for our dogs.

And someday, I'll share each story with my girls as I hand the ornaments down to them and hope that they, too, will remember the stories and share them with their families someday.