We are blessed to live in one of the larger homes our military installation offers for my husband's rank! This, however, does not mean our house is big enough for all of our belongings. A fairly common solution to this very common occurrence is to rent a storage unit in the nearest town and most towns outside of a military installation have many to choose from. A few months ago my husband went to our storage unit to pull some of our baby's clothes out and noticed that our Christmas decorations (that had previously been stacked neatly against the wall) had fallen all over the unit. As one can imagine this wreaked havoc on the many, many fragile ornament we no longer own. So when my wonderful husband began to drag the many Christmas boxes we have out of storage I began the process of throwing away the broken ornaments, pulling out the unbroken yet fragile (and unsentimental) ones to give away, and keeping mostly the picture frame ornaments (that I will not claim to have filled with our pictures yet). This means we had about 8-10 ornaments for our full size, pre-lit Christmas tree and that I was headed to "Wally World" to locate a few replacements where I purchased approximately 20 large "shatter proof" ornaments in red, green, and silver as well as 3 cute ornaments that A picked out. This is obviously not enough to make my tree look full however I plan to add additional photo ornaments as the years pass and have a tree that may not be at place in a magazine but actually means something to me. Our tree is sadly lacking bead garland (we have 2 cats and cannot put the shiny garland on the tree as they would most assuredly eat it) as it is either laying somewhere in the storage unit or got lost in the last move and no one local carries it. So I am sharing a photo of my somewhat sparse Christmas tree but I choose to be happy with it just the way it is!
Having pets and small children always presents a decorating challenge. How have you overcome this challenge?
We put small bells on the two bottom sets of branches. The cats learn pretty quick that the tree is a noisy thing and they leave it alone, even the kittens. Now they've figured out how to get under the tree to lay on the antique velvet tree skirt, without ringing the bells!
ReplyDeleteAs you know, I buy an ornament each year for each of my 9 grandchildren and now 2 greats. When they get married, they receive a velvet box with their ornaments from over the years. I use a general theme (this year red and silver) and then load the tree with all the sentimental ornaments. Looks like I may have to replace a few this year for a special grandaughter!!
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