6 feet of MAGIC

Here is my post of my 2nd decorating experience in my apartment. Let me start with a pre-story. My mom is the Christmas light putter-onner in our family. My brother is her second in command. It was only ever my job to unravel the lights for them while they put them on. I was always fine with that. It was always a joke in the family that someone would have to run to the store to get more lights because we wouldn't have enough. All those years of Christmas decorating fun have culminated to me taking over the reins in my own household and have resulted in my fun-filled day.

Let me give you some statistics that will make my mom proud :) :

6 foot Christmas tree

5 hours

3 trips to the store for more lights (2 of which were made by Emily, one by me)

1500+ lights (yes, you read that right)

15 strands of lights (we think at least one of them was more than 100 lights)

2 calls to my mom to ask questions about putting lights on the tree

1 fabulous, magnificent tree!

1 afternoon of fun/roommate bonding

1 more Christmas memory to file away in my brain


Here is the final result:

If you scroll down to my previous post, you can see the poor, pathetic attempt of putting on only 3 strands of lights last year. What a difference 12 new strands makes :)

Here it is with the flash.

Last year I posted lots of pictures of Christmas ornaments on the tree. Here are a few more, plus other decorations in the house. This is my 2008 ornament. I panicked because I couldn't find it at first. But then I realized that I was looking for the 2009 box (which I don't have yet because I haven't opened presents from 2009 yet!).

This is an ornament Mom bought me from my hometown in Georgia.

I have always loved the Willow Tree Nativity set, so I asked for Mom to start the collection for me. These are the pieces I got last year (except the lady holding the lamb and the little boy--those are pieces I have out throughout the year, but decided to add to the Christmas decorations because I figured they still applied).

This is the ornament I got last year at the Forsberg Christmas party. We have a tree that we do an ornament exchange off of every year. You bring an ornament and then take one off the tree at the end of the night. In the background is one of a set of ornament bulbs I bought last year after Christmas because I thought they were fun. They came in all sorts of colors--pink, gold, blue, green, red.

Many years ago Hallmark had these snowmen for sale. Jan Karon wrote a very popular series of books called The Mitford series. These snowmen are inspired by the book and there was even a gift book that was written to go along with the series. Mom let me take them last year to decorate the apartment. This year they are on my book shelves.