Oh Christmas Tree..

On Tuesday night we ventured out to get our Christmas tree. Some years we have cut our own, other years we've gone to local outdoor tree lots. This year we decided to go to our neighborhood Home Depot. It was chilly out, I was expecting a sheltered, well lit area where we could look at the trees in all of their glory. Ummm...I was wrong. The trees were in the garden area outside of the store, not many lights on, and all of the trees bundled up so you couldn't even see their shapes. But we were there, and the prices were ok, so we decided to take our chances and pick out a mystery tree. We found one that was the right height and had a nice base and a nice top...so we carted it through the whole store, tossed it in the van and brought it home.

Here it is after Eric trimmed the bottom, put it in the stand and I removed the twine that was binding it...tall and straight in it's frozen glory. It didn't look like it was going to open up at all. Oh Oh. Maybe it will be better in the morning....

...and it was! We lucked out, the tree is wonderful.

I put on the lights, and decided we needed more...off to Target we went. The extra lights did the trick. Then I added the angel to the top, my old crystal beads, and stuck in some ribbon and called it done! No, not really....I'm still working on the rest. But look, two pictures of me on my own blog...what do you think of that!

The angel did tell me that the lights and ribbon were enough for the first day though. Isn't she pretty? It seems a little odd to me that as the shortest person in this house I was the one to put the angel all the way up on the top of that tree!

Today I have been adding ornaments. I have a big collection of rocking horse/ toy horse ornaments. Here is just one of the boxes of boxes. They aren't all rocking horses, but a lot of them are!

I've been collecting them here and there for the last 30 years. This is one of the older ones...hello there pretty pony.

I think that it all started with the Hallmark Rocking horse series. I am proud to say that I have them all.

But it's not just the Hallmark collection, I have all kinds of horses. Here's little boy blue blowing his horn on a horse. Or something like that. Toot.

Another Hallmark pony. I'll show more in the weeks to come. I remember where or who most of them came from. Such good memories when each one comes out of it's box.

It's December, the ponies are on the tree....Christmas is in the air. It really is the most wonderful time of the year!