O Christmas Tree

A few weeks ago, we put up our Christmas tree.

Before Thanksgiving.

It was my husband's idea. We felt justified because he worked on Thanksgiving.

And we are as impatient for Christmas as two little kids.

Yes, our tree is fake.

This is bittersweet to me.

I ADORE real Christmas trees. The smell of them makes me giddy. Growing up, our trees were always fake because of my mom's asthma. But when I married Mr. Brown Eyes, I had my first experience with my own real tree. I fell so deeply in love with that tree that I named it Gustav and I just might have kept it up until it was nothing more than a skeleton surrounded by a pile of dry needles.



Luckily my husband intervened and convinced me Gustav would be happier in that big tree-lot in the sky.

We bought real trees for a couple years. Then we decided it would be more economical to buy a tree we could use more than once, that we could leave up for months without worrying about it drying out and catching fire.

For now, at least.

I do miss that real-tree smell.

Has anyone ever found a close imitation in candle-form? Every "pine" scented candle I have ever smelled just reminds me of an old lady's house.

No offense to all you old ladies out there.

It was pretty close to Christmas when we bought our current tree. It was the display and the last one in the store, so they gave us a deal on it that included all these cute little ornaments:

Cute little glass ornaments. As we hauled the tree out to our truck, we were accompanied by the sweet tinkling of ornaments falling off and shattering on the asphalt.

We managed to save most of them, though. And hopefully the rest will survive Brown-Eyed Boy.

He wanted so much to help us decorate the tree. We tried to confine him to the less-breakable ornaments, like these cute little glittery birds:

He hung most of them in one spot, upside down. His own special two year-old touch to our tree. It made me smile.

He begged to put the other ornaments up, too, and he did a really good job when we told him to be careful.

Then we told him that Christmas trees are just for looking at, and not for touching.

 And then we laughed at ourselves.

Christmas is more fun with a two year-old,

The Brown-Eyed Girl