A tall, tall keepsake of memories.

While putting up our Christmas tree this year, I had a little Epiphany. I realized that our tree with all it's ornaments was a tall keepsake of memories. We've always stuck to ornaments that mean something to us personally and rarely put what we would label as a generic ornament up on the tree. I know that I may be the last to realize this, but at least I've finally come to your side of thinking. For instance:

We have rarely all been together as a family, but the one year were together in late 90's, my mom purchased this pickle. It came in a cute jar and tole of an old German tradition of hiding the pickle in your tree and the person who finds it is honored with good luck. Even when we didn't have the girls, we would have my mother-in-law hide the pickle and Craig and I would try to find it - or the opposite.

This ornament we purchased in Alexandria, VA. We lived here for five years and fell in love with everything about it and have lots of very fond memories here. This ornament helps us remember them.

This ornament was given to Craig by has 3rd grade teacher! How fun is that, to still have this ornament.

We just love to purchase ornaments from any traveling we've done. This ornament is one of a set of six, Craig and I picked up on a 10 day trip through Austria. We took a train from Vienna to Bratislava, Slovakia and picked these ornaments up there. It was so much fun! What are your ornament memories?

We've also started to collect ornaments with our travels with the girls, or of ornaments representing where we've lived. We decided to have these ornaments displayed as a tradition, so that we can talk about them and help them remember the trip or any memories from the experience.

On tradition that we've totally failed on is that of a real tree - rather than going fake. We were so sticker shocked at the price of a real Christmas tree in California- that we opted to buy one and am sad to say haven't gone back. It's so easy - yet, as a gal from the NW, where we only ever had live trees - I feel very embarrassed admitting our fake tree tradition. Last year we decided to purchase a small real tree so that we wouldn't feel so bad. We usually do this closer to Christmas. So without further ado here is some video of our evening decorating - this first is Cici talking about some ornaments that Craig's dad and mom made and the 2nd is putting the star on the tree, it's dark, but you get the picture:

I found a great link today to the Friend Magazine clipart - check it out here

I hope everyone is having a great weekend and look forward to hearing all about the Utah snow storm - who played in the snow this weekend? We have a storm due tomorrow, which has already cancelled some extra-curricular events - we'll see though!