Oh, Christmas Tree....

Our tree was up with lights strung.   The decorations weren't up yet.  There just hadn't seemed to be enough time.

We spent time visiting with friends in their homes one weekend.  The first evening I took notice of the tree in the living room.  Decorated to match the room in a crisp apple red.  The gifts under the tree wrapped perfectly to match.  We spent the rest of the evening in their beautifully, newly remodeled basement family room.  In that room sat a tree decorated in blue; the perfect accent color to the brown hues in the rest of the room.  The gifts also wrapped to match the tree they sat under.   They also had a beautifully decorated tree in the master bedroom.

The second evening we spent in the new home of our very good friends.  The previous owners of the home could not take the their Christmas tree with them so our friends were able to purchase it and use.  I think it was like 13 feet high!!!  I really don't know how tall it was but my friend needed a ladder to decorate it!!!  The towering, giant evergreen adorned in red was breathtaking!   

As I lay in bed that night thinking back on the trees we had seen I realized I was having tree envy.  The trees that I had seen over the weekend all could have been in Christmas magazines.  Mine sat in our living room, undecorated, with lights falling off from curious cats.  I knew it would be decorated eventually but my tree would not be fit for a magazine.  

I sighed.  "Everyone has such pretty Christmas trees."

"I think your tree says a lot about who you are."  My Sweetie commented.

I had decided that today was the day that the tree would be decorated.  I carried up the containers that held our decorations from our basement and gently pulled them out one by one holding them for just a second before placing them on the table.  

There were several "Babies First Christmas" ornaments.  Ornaments my mom bought for our boys every year with their names and dates on them.  Ornaments that My Sweeties mom either bought or made our boys every year.  Ornaments that were My Sweeties when he was a child.  Ornaments that we brought home with us from Disney world.  Ornaments with younger, sweet faces of our boys sprinkled with glitter. Ornaments that were made by our boys and given to us as gifts.

It was like opening a box of memories.  Everyone of these ornaments had either been given or made with love.  Everyone of these ornaments had a story behind them.  

At the end of the night, after the precious hands of anxious boys had carefully placed all of those memories on the tree so lovingly...

 I stepped back and took a look.

 It was just as breathtaking as the ones I had seen just a week ago.    It was sitting exactly where I had envisioned it to sit for our first Christmas in our yellow house on the prairie.  It was full of love, full of memories and looked so much more beautiful and more perfect than I had envisioned.