I hate to admit it but, this is the first year I’ve really liked how our tree looks.  Finally.  First off, I decided to buy a random tree from the front of the Food Lion grocery store.  Our tree was $29.99 and my 10-year-old and I bought it by ourselves.  Yep, no fancy photos of the entire family picking out the perfect tree.  We’ve done that and it’s fun but the reality was this year, we’d be dragging our 14-year-old along and he’d rather drink hot chocolate and hang ornaments then pick out the tree and I’m good with that. Okay, he’d rather drink hot chocolate and play with the aging booth app than pick out the tree.  I’m still okay with that, you pick your battles. So my husband and 11-year-old opted out as well.  I think Christmas will be just fine with a tree that only two of us picked out.

We hung all our neutral ornaments on this, the real tree, and all the blue and green ornaments on the pretend white tree in the family room.  Then I shopped the house and added the finger knit scarf thing that Caroline made for me, a roll of burlap and I moved that book page garland from the hutch to the tree.

It’s really imperfect and random and natural looking. You know, for having a cut down tree in one’s home.

This is the first year in my 16 Christmases of being married that I have a real tree skirt.  Reeve found this one and it was only $18 and she convinced me it was a steal.  She was right.

Here she is pre-skirt. I just threw the cowhide around it.  I like it fine but, it didn’t really cover the back.  And for the past few years we let our boys choose if they want presents under the tree or if they’d rather take an overnight family trip.  They keep choosing the trip so our tree is always bare underneath until I wrap gifts for our extended family which is normally last-minute.  So a real tree skirt does help keep things looking neat and tidy.

Every day I find myself tucking a few extra things into the tree.  West Elm was selling some stars wrapped in yarn.  So I copied them with starfish I’ve had for years.

So, that’s our main tree.  We have two others but I’m too lazy to take pictures of them.

I’ll be linking up with Thrifty Decor Chick‘s Christmas Tree Party tonight, hope you join me.

******

And if you missed it, today there are two posts–actually we will have THREE: this one here you are reading, this one from this morning with pertinent info on linking up to the Tour of Homes Christmas Party, AND, surprise, in honor of our west coast friends we are starting the party early–like tonight–after dinner, before I go to bed!!!  It’s too much!