Christmas Tree Traditions....

     We all have our Christmas holiday traditions; some are unique while others are so similar you can’t tell them apart from other families. One that almost all of us have in common is the Christmas tree. We might have different sizes, shapes and even colors. Let’s not forget some of us have artificial while others have the real sap dripping trees.

     Some of you might be aware of this blog; http://geneabloggers.com, if not I would recommend if you do blog and enjoy genealogy pay it a visit. On their blog they are posting prompts for December so I thought I would give this prompt a try. It was a prompt about Christmas trees and your family’s traditions around them. So without further ado here we go with mine, let’s see if I can remember that far back.

     The tradition that I currently share with my family is pretty close to the one I had growing up. From what I can remember we always had an artificial tree, I don’t know why exactly. Hey mom if you’re reading this maybe you can clue me in on why we never had a real tree? Don’t get me wrong we had a beautifully decorated tree that we would wait until after Thanksgiving before putting up. Dad would drag the box out of the attic, along with all the other festive decorations. It was always put up in the same place in our living room, so when you walked in the front door that was the first thing you would see. For some reason we, my two brothers and I, were never allowed to hang the lights. I bet it had something to do with our inability to cast a fishing line without wrapping it around a tree branch, love you dad.

     Mom would pull out all of the breakable ornaments and hang them in just the perfect places. Then we were allowed to hang up the remaining, some were handcrafted that we made the previous years and others were gift ornaments we had received from our grandparents.  We would step back take a quick look and make sure the tree was balanced with equal ornaments on all sides of the tree.  Next was the   fun of throwing the silver tinsel. Just kidding that was one thing we couldn’t do; we would each take a handful. Then with around three to four strands of tinsel neatly place it on the tree. But no matter what you could ALWAYS find a golf ball size clump of tinsel somewhere on the tree. The decorating wasn’t complete until we placed the Christmas village with the ice skating rink under the tree. Then FA LA LA LA LA the tree was finished and now time for the rest, hang all stockings, more lights and place the rest of the decorations throughout the house.