The Holiday Tree

When my husband and I bought our house, we bought a large pre-lit Christmas tree to put in our living room. We did not have a lot of furniture so we had room for something that large.

For our son David's first Christmas we decided not to put a tree up. He was almost 6 months old and starting to crawl. We thought it best not to give him more things to get in to.

When he was 4 he asked for his own tree. We had been given a lot of furniture by family and friends and no longer had room for the large tree. So, we bought a table top tree and let David decorate it with silk balls and garland. He had so much fun decorating it by himself. I'm normally the perfectionist, but I didn't touch any of the decorations. There were clumps of garland, branches that had 6 balls hanging them and other spots that were completely bare. He was so proud of his new found decorating skills.

When the Christmas season was over, I got out the boxes and started taking the decorations off. David came into the room and saw what I was doing. He yelled for me to stop and started crying, telling me through his tears that I couldn't take it down. I told him that Christmas was over and it was time to take all the decorations down. He continued crying, saying that he loved that tree. I told him that I really liked it too, but at some point the decorations would have to come down and that this was the perfect time. He asked me if we could keep the tree up and decorate it for other holidays? I thought a minute. Why not? I told him that yes, I thought we could do that.

So, the tree stood bare until a couple weeks later when I took him to the dollar store. They had just started putting out their Valentine's Day decorations. I got garland with hearts on it and a few pink flowers to put on the tree. I thought this was perfect. We would just go to the dollar store and get different garland for each holiday. For St Patrick's Day, we have garland with green clovers. For Easter we have tiny wooden egg ornaments and garland with pastel colored bunnies. For Memorial Day through Labor Day we have red, white and blue stars. For Halloween the garland has purple and black bats. Thanksgiving garland has fall colored leaves. Now that he's older, for Christmas we got him some tiny glass balls to hang. He made some ornaments out of Styrofoam balls and we have a long string of bead garland he wraps around the tree.

He has so much fun decorating and you can always tell what season it is by looking at our holiday tree!