A Tale of Two (or Three) Trees

I'm sure it just about killed Brett. Not only did we still have Christmas decorations still up a week (or more) after Christmas, we even had two Christmas trees shining in our front windows.

It gets better. At one point, I owned three Christmas trees.
I finally decided that it was time to replace the Charlie Brown tree that I have been setting up since before we had kids. I set out on the day after Christmas to buy a tree, and I wasn't coming home without one.

My sister-in-law and I first tried Kmart. The nice trees they had left all had multi-colored lights. There was one floor model that I especially liked. Of course, they were sold out. We asked about buying the floor model. They sold it to us as is (without a box). They had to remove the decorations before I could take it, so we said that we would come back later. We made our way to Target and found another tree that seemed nice. It had some fancy lighting features, such as giving you the option of lighting the multi-colored strands, the white strands, or both. Unfortunately, there was no floor model. I bought it, took it home, and set up. The tree had a remote control that worked the lights, but you had to use the remote control to get it to turn on. I couldn't get it working. I checked everything. Finally I decided that 1) this was a recipe for disaster if the remote got lost or broken, and 2) the tree that I paid for (but had not yet picked up) was prettier. So, I went back and got the Kmart tree (and later returned the Target tree).

Because the Kmart tree had no box, we loaded it up into the bed of the pickup truck. I set it up right in the dining room until I could figure out how to store it and get it into the attic. The boys loved having the new tree set up. They loved the multi-colored lights, and plugged it in every morning. Todd had a great time transferring ornaments from our old tree over to the new one. You can see where his reach ends. (The lone red-ribboned ornament was a beaded wreath that Todd tossed a little higher.)

I'm excited about having a pretty tree. (It will look even better when the branches are straightened out) It's funny though. I didn't realize how much I loved the white lights on my old tree. I have had white lights forever, it seems. And, like I mentioned before--even though it was scrawny and a little pathetic in the daytime, when compared with our new tree in the evening with the lights out, my old tree with its white lights still held a little more magic for me than our new one.

I do hope that will change next year when I put up our new tree and fill it up with all the ornaments. (I do have a few extra strands of white lights that I can put on if it comes to that.)