A Tree of Great Sentiment

Last week during Gemma's birthday party, John went out to the garden bed and chopped down our Christmas tree.  :)

It was the neighbor to the tree we chopped down two years ago. At that time, it was only waist-high.  Now, it stands probably close to eight feet high in our living room!  I can only imagine how it would have looked if we'd left it growing.  (It does seem odd to plant such a tree in a raised bed amid small bushes!)

So, once again, we have a happily real (and free!) Christmas tree in our living room.  With Gemma's birth last year, I didn't decorate at all.  The church sent poinsettias which I lovingly gazed upon while nursing my newborn, and we traveled to New York for Christmas itself.  

This tree is unabashedly wild.  :)  Somewhat bare and scrawny, it is nevertheless no longer the first Christmas tree of a couple of newlyweds.  Then, we merely stuck our tree in a flower pot of dirt and dangled it with decorated cookies, but this year I actually bought a tree stand at Target.  It is so scrawny that only the innermost branches are strong enough to hold our growing collection of ornaments!  So many people love us . . . Gemma has at least three ornaments of her own already, and we have about as many couple/family ornaments joining the gorgeous Lenox and Wedgewood pieces my Mom-in-law has divded up among her daughters-in-law.

 This one will always be one of my favorites, though, because John gave it to me at that first Christmas.  The person in the mall who sold it even put our intials on the snowman and woman's mittens.  :)

And there are a few of those cookie ornaments which I coated with nail polish and saved. The most precious is this little heart, on which I piped "Our Baby," only a couple of days after we learned that our first baby was lost.

There's the upstairs tree, too.  It's a little tree I bought at a garage sale during my college years.  It has traveled through life with me from dorm room to teacher's desk to the sewing machine in the window of our first home, and it makes me happy.

So, these are our trees this year . . . both capitalizing on sentiment, like sentimental me.  :)