Kitschy Christmas

Most of our Christmas decorations are up - and its looking very Christmas-y around here!  This is the first year ever I have not had a real tree, and the first year ever I had my tree up before December.  (our fake white tree went up on Nov 30th).  My opinion about Christmas decorations is: the tackier, the better.  If you can't be gaudy and over the top at Christmas, when can you be?  Our tree has no "theme".  Its just a bunch of crazy mismatched ornaments.  Most of them have some special meaning or story behind them.  For example:

Lucy was born in December.  At the hospital, there was a Christmas tree decorated with hundreds of  knitted booties that were hand made by volunteers and donated to the hospital.  Each mother that gave birth that month got to pick a pair of booties from the tree to take home with her.  I chose these ones.

I found a perfect pack of these vintage ornaments in a antique store in Virginia in 2003, when we went there for Thanksgiving to visit my sister Marie. 

This is Welby.  In case its not obvious, he is an owl.

I made him a few years ago for Violet.  She named him after my sister-in-law Tammy's step-dad. 

This is another bird ornament I made

(this one doesn't have a name)

And of course, the pickle.  Do you guys play spot the pickle?  Its tradition - that on Christmas morning, whoever finds the pickle hiding in the tree, gets an extra little prize.

(its pretty easy to spot the pickle in our white tree this year)

Ok,  I admit it - this little guy has no story.  I have no idea where he came from.  But he is one of my favorites.

And this is what it looks like, all together. 

 

See that window way up high above our tree?  The first year we lived here, we got a tree so tall, that the star could be seen in that window.  We wanted to take advantage of the height in our new house and get something tall and slim for that corner.  We picked the tallest, slimmest tree we could find on the lot.  Once we got it in our living room, we realized that it was, indeed tall, but not actually very slim.  We had to trim the branches around our TV screen.  And Jacob risked his life putting the star in place.  Why don't I have a picture of that???