I love the Christmas season and especially love decorating! I tend to go all out around the house. Four trees is not too many right?
My dad came up to the house yesterday afternoon and I helped him to decorate the outside of the house with lights. Even though my dad doesn’t live there anymore, he still enjoys putting up the lights. I have to say he has it down to a science and it would take me twice as long if I did it alone. I know this post is about my favorite tree in the house but, here is a picture of the lights on the house!
Story Behind The Tree:
I wanted to give you all just a brief background behind this tree. This will help you to see why this tree is so special to me. Originally, this tree used to be our old neighbors from the area we first grew up in. Our family was very close with them and we always loved when they would put this tree up every year. The ornaments on this tree were all hand made by Mrs. Mary herself and I could not even imagine the amount of time that was put into them. Mrs. Mary was Ukrainian and these bulbs are so elaborate and elegant.
When Mrs. Mary passed away she literally left this tree and all of the ornaments to my mom in her will. My mom was so touched to have been given the tree. Especially because we all knew how important and loved it was by Mrs. Mary. Every year the tree would be put up by my mom and brother. My brother was in charge of building the tree and my mom took on the sole responsibility of putting all the ornaments on.
My mom passed away in February of 2016 and I knew that we had to continue the tradition of having this tree up for Christmas. My brother was able to build it for a couple years after for me and I was in charge of the ornaments. It was sad to be doing this job because I know that it was one my mom loved to do so much.
The amount of time that goes into getting this tree completely done is intense and I don’t know how my mom would get it done in one day. I have to spread this out over a few days. But, I will always put this tree up to keep the memories of both Mrs. Mary and my mom alive during the Christmas Season.
The Process Of The Tree:
The first step of the process is to get the stand set up and the pole of the tree. The base is extremely heavy so I have to get help from my dad to get it up from the basement. Then the start of putting the branches in starts. This is a love process because you need to put the branches into the pole individually! They are all color coded and this took me about an hour and a half to do.
The next step was added about 3 years after my mom passed away. That step is adding the white lights. Originally, when Mrs. Mary had the tree up in her basement she had a spotlight on it. When my mom put the tree in our house we didn’t have the spot light. After talking with my brother and dad, we thought that adding white lights would be nice because it will really help you to see the ornaments and it would look beautiful at night when the lights are off. This tree takes 5 strands of lights. Adding the lights is tricky because there are hooks already spread throughout the branches for the ornaments. So, the lights will often get caught on all the hooks as your are wrapping them around the tree.
The last phase of this tree is adding all of the ornaments. The lights look weird when there are no ornaments on because the spacing is so off. But, I promise it’s the ornaments that really pull all of the tree together. The tree has a massive amount of ornaments. To be exact there are 5 under the bed bins and one normal bin of them! I spread the putting of the ornaments over 3 nights this year. Like I had mentioned before the ornaments go on wired hooks that are already on all of the branches. So, you just need to search for an fill as many of the hooks that you can! After mom passed away we did also attach hooks to some of the bulbs and those were placed a little further into the tree to fill it up even more. Each of these ornaments are so unique and they have a lot of color and sparkle to them. The tree will look different each year because of the randomness of the branches in each row and the placement of the ornaments!
I really hope that you enjoyed this post because it was so special of me to share with you all! I hope that your December is going well so far! Stay tuned for more fun Holiday past as we continue to get closer and closer to Christmas!