Our first tree.

It's our seventh married (and merried :)) Christmas and this is the first year we have put up a tree and I love it! When I walk in the door the smell reminds me of my Aunt Robin's. It must be the combination of pine and fresh sea air that produces an especially sweet fragrance but I'm going to have a hard time taking it down. It also reinforces that we made the right choice by springing for the live tree. Although the artificial can be stunning and afford perfection, I like our short fat tree that is slightly lopsided. Picking it out was a family affair, with my parents, the kids and Ben making the trek to the Marine base to choose our prize. We went down every aisle with Ben spotting "the one".

I'm not the best decorator, for holidays or in general, so it's good that our tree had some character of it's own. Although we have never had a tree I have collected some ornaments that I really treasure over the years including a spider made by Amy T., a sassy and sparkly fish from Gma Maggie and gold-plated Aspen leaves from Ben's mom to name a few. My mom also brought a cool red star that I am excited to add to the collection.

So how to you marry the hope of a constant color-theme with the desire to keep it familiar and meaningful? I'm not sure but that's what I was going for. After driving myself nuts longing for this and that department store tree - from cool blues to purple and gold to "under-the-sea" or nautical motifs, I found these sparkly "things" and went from there. And although we need a few more ornaments and apparently "a lot" more lights (Ben's input - even though I got the BIG box, I didn't know I needed more than one, like I said, our first tree. I just hope they can be added without so much as moving an ornament because I spent minutes trying to get the light to shine through the Aspen leaf just so), I really like the way it turned out.