I'm a sucker for Christmas decorations, even though, I'm not really thrilled with the cost of most of them, however we decided to 'splurge' a bit this year and get a new Christmas tree. Our old one still works, however it is too tall for the basement room and we didn't feel comfortable setting up the tree upstairs with my daughter able to pull items off. I haven't quite mastered figuring out the going to the bathroom while the kid is playing and I certainly don't want a 7.5 foot tree toppling on her- nor all our fragile ornaments being broken.
First I guess I should explain about the ornaments- my husband and I collect ornaments. For every big trip/occasion we get a beautiful ornament to commemorate the memory so our Christmas tree is a bit of a time capsule. Pulling out all those funky ornaments and remembering what they were from is one of the experiences I look forward to the most. Our engagement- yup, ornament. Wedding- a given. My golden birthday trip to the Smokey Mountains- it's in there. Juliette's first birthday trip to see the "make way for ducklings" ducks- oh yes. Our first apartment, house, pet, our first pet's passing away- yes they are in there- even some heartbreaking ones. So I can't leave them off- it's what gives our tree character. Also, it's what keeps my house clean- as you know ornaments are small- so collecting them doesn't take up a lot of room and they only come out for 1 month so no dusting!
So it was time to get a new tree. We wanted something 6.5ft tall (so we could still do our star) and fairly realistic with the requirement of LED lights. Let me tell you- this was harder to find than I thought it would be! No local retailers carried a 6.5 ft LED tree. The 7 ft trees were REALLy expensive too, so we hit the online black Friday sales. I try so hard to avoid black Friday as it goes against all Christmas spirit in my opinion, but online wasn't so bad- I knew they wouldn't fill my order until Monday so no poor employees were being forced to work on my account. (I refuse to shop on Thanksgiving for the same reason and have decided that I will not frequent stores that felt the money was worth more than letting their employees have the holiday that focuses on family off- ok enough of that rant...). I found two very nice artificial tree sites and one of them had a really reasonable price on what I was looking for so we got it at
TreeClassics.com. I must admit I was apprehensive - we bought a clearance tree and it still wasn't cheap. I was hoping for a really realistic looking tree as well for this reason as I don't intend to replace this tree for a very, very long time if ever. We got it and put it up -which was rather challenging (it actually is harder to put together than our old tree and I am not looking forward to trying to take it down for the same reason). The tree itself is nice and full and the branches definitely look more realistic than any other artificial tree I've seen- so I am pleased with it. In addition, all the trees on the site were nice because they resist the straight triangle look that some trees have (you know what I am talking about? Go to a store and look at the trees- how many have a branch that is longer above a branch that is shorter? I'm going to guess you won't find many, but real trees don't grow that way- they have some variety). It doesn't have as many lights on it as I would expect for a tree it's size and no lights are even partially inside the tree, so our long ornaments don't have the light on them at all (because they have to hang through branches. However it looks spectacular decorated (of our non-memory ornaments we have a winter theme so it is silver, white and blues instead of reds and greens of which we ended up going out and getting a bit more blue ornaments because this thing is significantly bigger than our last tree so they got a bit lost in there) and looks spectacular with a fire. I am pleased.
doesn't that just make you want to watch a Holiday movie? On to the next decorations...
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