I thought I’d share some of our Happy Home’s Christmas traditions this year!
To start things off here’s the lowdown on how we do our tree.
Since our Happy Buddies are so young, the Happy Hubby and I like to put up our tree as a part of an ‘at-home’ Date Night.
We do this the day after Thanksgiving.
If we don’t – the tree does not get up. Haha!
When our boys get a little older, I know we’ll expand this tradition to include them, but for now, it’s a great way to connect and spend time with the Happy Hubby.
Plus, nothing gets broken and I get to make the tree look exactly as I want it (any other control freaks out there???)! 🙂
We put the kids to bed, heat up some hot cocoa, watch our favorite Christmas movie, and get to work.
Here are some photos from our adventure the other night!
Putting up this tree is such a labor of love.
Yes, we do the fake tree. I have the blackest of thumbs – a long time ago I begged the Happy Hubby to stop buying me flowers because they wilt as soon as we make eye contact! A real tree would never survive under my care.
Getting that monster in and out of the box is like trying to put a T-Shirt on an octopus.
And this year 75% of the lights burned out so the Happy Hubby went to Wal-Mart to battle the tail end of Black Friday shoppers for a few boxes of lights. He is such a good man!
My job is to fluff the branches.
This step is probably my least favorite thing about getting the tree up.
By the time I am done, my hands look like someone poked them a hundred times with a sharp pencil.
One day I will get a clue and try wearing gloves!
Now for the fun part!
Oh how I love pulling out the ornaments, unwrapping each one and reminiscing about where that ornament originated.
The Happy Hubby and I were married a few days after Christmas in 2003, so most of our ornaments were wedding gifts!
This movie – The Family Man with Nicolas Cage – is a MUST to be playing while we are decorating.
The Happy Hubby and I spend the evening basically quoting the entire thing.
I really hate going to bed knowing that there’s a giant mess waiting for me in the morning, so I try to get everything picked up before turning in for the night.
Now that we have kids, we can’t vacuum – lest we rouse the slumbering monkeys angels – and all those tiny artificial pine needles make my head spin.
This year the Happy Hubby had a brilliant alternative plan!
He grabbed an old paper towel tube, wrapped it in Duct tape and set about rolling it all over the carpet under the tree.
It totally worked!!! And no one woke up! 🙂
By the time our movie ended, we got to sit back and admire our handiwork.
Would you like to read more details about our tree – my favorite ornaments (the cutest things EVER) and our favorite Pickle Tradition?
Click on over to THIS POST.
I do want the Happy Buddy to enjoy the tree with us, so we saved a bunch of (indestructible) ornaments for him to put on in the morning. 🙂
And this year the Happy Baby got to see a Christmas tree for the first time ever… What a precious moment.
How do y’all do your tree? Real or fake? With the kids or without? When do you put it up? Do you have favorite ornaments?
I’d love to hear about your Tree Traditions!
Happy Tree Tradition-ing! 🙂
LOVE this account of setting up the Christmas Tree! Especially “cracked up” of the line “trying to put a T-Shirt on an octopus”!! Bet your kids were amazed the next morning! Last year, my hubby, “Joe Beau” put the center section of the tree on upside down, had no place to plug it in and refused to take it apart. The entire “waist” of the tree was unlit. A rather bleak effect, if you ask me. I will try to “supervise” this year . . .
We put our tree up the day after Thanksgiving as well. We have to have a fake tree because I am allergic to the real ones. Every year we buy an ornament that somehow represents the year for us or represents a happy memory we had. We mark the year on the bottom and then when they are unpacked and hung up, we remember why we picked that particular ornament and what it means to us. We each hang our special ornaments up ourselves and then our daughter gets to hang up all the balls and candy canes and various other odds and ends. Sometimes everything ends up on one side of the tree and it’s bare in the back, but if she thinks it’s beautiful that’s all that matters to us. :o)
Michelle, love your heart! And I know your daughter is so blessed! Maybe next year I will loosen up a bit and let the Happy Buddy have at it! 🙂 Thanks for stopping by the Fairy. xoxo
Or you could always get him his very own tiny tree to decorate just the way he wants it. That way you have your beautiful tree and your tradition with your husband and Happy Buddy has his own contribution to make to the season.
Love to sees your traditions. Yay!! So happy to see your sweet family enjoying the holiday. Xoxo
I love this post! Totally made me cry happy tears. We have several Christmas Traditions in our little family. My happy babies are 4 and 5 now. But every since they were born, we would go to the Christmas tree lot in front of our local Home Depot and pick out a tree as a family, and strap it to the top of my sedan (kinda like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation movie), and we would drive home and wave to those that stared at us as we passed them on the road. We knew what they were thinking, but we never cared. Inside our little car, we were always laughing and singing Christmas Carols.
Another tradition we have followed since my kids were age 1 and 2, (and that I actually did as a little girl), was called the B.O.B (Box of Blessings). Starting December 1st and every night after dinner, until Christmas Eve, we could gather together as a family and pull out a box decorated with Christmas wrapping paper, and inside were 24 wrapped presents each with a number on it and a Bible verse pertaining to Christmas. For example, on December 1st, we would open #1 and open our Bible and read the verse associated with it as a family. And then the kids would open the wrapped gift. Sometimes it was a Christmas candle or an ornament for the tree, or the missing piece to our nativity, or a children’s book about the real meaning of Christmas, etc, etc. Each night it was something different. Sometimes it involved a treasure hunt. Only the # and bible verse would be written on a piece of paper in the box, and the kids would have to look throughout the house to find the gift. And always on December 24th, the present would be the same. It would be the baby Jesus from our nativity set. Because Christmas is when we celebrate Jesus’ birthday. So when we would decorate for Christmas and set up our nativity, baby Jesus was always missing. When the kids would ask where he was, I would say, :”well, he wasn’t born until Christmas! We have to wait until he shows up on His birthday!” They always got a kick out of that.
Anyways, all that to say, I love reading your blog. I am so encouraged by it. And I make all your crafts with my kids. We actually had a happy home fairy Thanksgiving this year. I took all your ideas from previous posts and incorporated them into my Thanksgiving. I hosted all my extended family this year at my house. And all your ideas, games, crafts, jokes, and table conversation cards were a big hit!
Thanks again.
you made both of us lagh this morning! so fun! love that ryan did that for you:)
we do our tree the same way & my parents called us grinches- i don’t care! caitlyn doesn’t know any different and she loves putting up her few little ornaments! (she decorated her whole little section so we have a smattering of apples on the lower left corner of the tree- our tree has a chicken pock this year:) i refuse to redistribute them b/c it makes me smile! (talk about the new dana! haha:)
super duper miss you! still haven’t heard how jet is doing post-surgery… he looks great in his picture though so i’m assuming no news is good news!
i’m a touch under the weather today and my hero husband is going to go by himself w/the kids so i can get some more sleep. just can’t get enough of that these days!
have a wonderful day!
Great post about the tree! But guess what I like best? The reference to The Family Man! Somehow I’ve never seen that – and I love Nicholas Cage. Just watched the trailer and can’t wait to watch the whole movie! It looks great.
Your tree looks beautiful! I will have to check out that Nicholas Cage movie.
I just starting getting emails from you and I love this Christmas one. I even went back to the previous post. I love those Jesus ornaments also but when I clicked on it no info came up, probably cause it’s an old post. Oh well. My hub and I are in the process of decorating for this year. I had someone pop in awhile ago and they took one look at our lanai, (porch) with boxes and bags everywhere and they said, “Looks like you have your work cut out for today”! She felt better after I told her those were the empty ones!!! They have to go back into the shed only to be dragged back out after this holiday season and refilled and placed back in the shed once again till next year. This year hub got the bright idea to go through all the other “treasures” in the boxes and bags in the shed loft….oh dear. I am a craft nut and I have stuff going back to practically infancy!!! What a project. So instead of the empty boxes and bags leaving the lanai, they are still there and just may be for a few more days. Yikes!! I could ramble on but I have tons of work to do. Enjoy the blessings of this holiday with your cute little one and your cute big one as well!
you guys have a TON of ornaments!! My collection is no where that big.
My Hubby & I have one tradition ((and I don’t know if it can be called that yet))…. jumping in the hot tub with champagne. Then again this will only be our second Christmas together & our first married, but that just means plenty of time to come up with something awesome that’s just for us.
At my parents house, each of us four girls have two special ornaments – one we got to choose when we were young ((mine is an iridescent stained glass butterfly)), and the other is a porcelain piece my father brought home after being deployed a ways back.
We always get a real tree, the fattest or weirdest looking one we can find, and name it. The last couple have been Albert, Chauncey, Harold, Eugene, and Steve. My mom hands out ornaments for us to hang and we listen to “A Toolbox Christmas”, which is probably the coolest CD ever. It’s Christmas songs being made using only items you’d find in an awesome man cave garage. My dad always puts on his angel babies ((ornaments passed down from his father with years engraved on their scrolls)) the Walnut, and the tree topper.
My mom hides the pickle after we’ve all retired for the night and on Christmas Eve the first one to find it gets to give the first gift. :0)
Hi Julie… love your tree!… and this post of course 😉 Quick question… what kind of golden ribbon did you use to “wrap” your tree? Or… is it technically called a “garland?” Not sure. I presume your wrapped your ribbon around *before* you hung the ornaments? Any tips on what kind of ribbon you used and where you got it? Your tree looks amazing!!!
xoxo, Karen Mankin
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Hey girly! I found the glittery gold ribbon at Michael’s several years ago! AFter the tree is up and the lights are on, I start wrapping the ribbon from the top to the bottom. The hubs has to help by being on the other side and we carefully wrap it by passing it off to each other. 🙂 Then all the ornaments go on after that. Hope that helps!
Your tree is beautiful! How sweet of your hubby to improvise a quiet way to clean up the pine needles. We make an occasion of decorating the tree. We have yummy snacks and Christmas music playing. All of our ornaments are either special gifts or ones we have bought on occasions or trips, so as we decorate the tree we enjoy reminiscing. We call our tree a “Memory Tree”, because every ornament holds a memory for us. We have an artficial tree due to my allergies, plus it doesn’t keep dropping sharp needles the whole time it’s up like a real tree. When our daughter was little we let her hang her unbreakable ornaments. We saved the breakable ones until she was old enough to handle them carefully for her safety and the safety of the ornaments. lol We also had a child safe nativity set for our daughter. This so reinforced the true meaning of Christmas for her as she spent a great deal of time playing with it. (I did require that she keep it in the living room, so the pieces wouldn’t get mixed in with her toys in her bedroom.) As a young adult this is the nativity set that my daughter remembers best and cherishes. She uses it in the Sunday school class she teaches. Blessings and hugs!!!
Gorgeous! We do a live tree (We live in Oregon so we are surrounded by tree farms!) I’ll have to post pics soon. After we get home, the kids get to put on their ornaments along the bottom half and then after they go to bed, the hubby and I finish adding our special ornaments up higher. My favorite ornaments are the photo ones I’ve made each year. I always make one with a family photo and then one for each kid with a photo from their birthday. Loved the photos of your boys near the tree. Precious memories!
Well I am glad that you asked!! We for years had a fake tree and then it died last year (talk about a black thumb) so we bought our first ever (in 18 years) real tree, it was beautiful!!! This year we bought another one, it too was beautiful then my husband put on the lights (he loves a lot of lights) it started sagging, then as we put on the ornaments (there are 7 of us in 19 years of buying them, use your imagination) Well hello Charlie Brown!! Every year we get new ones for everyone so that when they are on their own they will have some for themselves and ours won’t be completely bare. Some ornaments have deep meaning, like some special thing that happened to them that year, some are not so much, like the fact that we have 5 ornaments that are all j’s. (all our children’s names start with j. (Some are worse and the kids are like “really, mom!?!) Each person puts on their own as we listen to Amy Grant’s Home for Christmas. We do enjoy doing this together and on the day after Thanksgiving. Merry Christmas all!
We are going with a new non-tradition this year…2-D Christmas trees! Perfect for our apartment, and this one that I made in jiffy doubles as a childproof “toy”! http://stickyfloorshappykids.com/childproof-christmas-tree/
Wow, what a beautiful tree! I love the duct tape idea. We use a lot of that in our home for any kind of project.