FHE - Tree Decorating

On Monday, we decided to put up and decorate the tree. Yeah, no fresh trees for us...no smells of forests and Christmas. We can't stomach the exorbitant prices of fresh trees. We've tried buying the potted kinds so that we can keep it for a while until it outgrows the house and then can be planted outdoors but most so called Christmas trees in pots aren't even fir trees...they are pine (they even have rosemary trimmed into a Christmas tree shape). We tried buying them from nurseries but they say that they don't grow here and while that may be true of some fir trees, it's not true of white fir trees and we have found them dotted all around the city including within a mile of the nursery). Believe it or not, we have even ordered seeds and tried to germinate them ourselves but to no avail.

So we unpacked and fluffed up the fake tree. The girls were bursting with excitement regardless. It was difficult to take pictures of the girls and hand out ornaments at the same time. They were so excited that they would have trampled them all to the ground if you didn't try to control them. Christian was helping them find places to put them up on the tree as well as helping with those hard to reach places.

We finally managed to get the tree up and decorated. It is one of Emily's favorite parts of Christmas (next to getting presents, of course).

We are going to try to dress the girls up this weekend to take their annual Christmas photo in front of the tree. That part isn't usually that fun, trying to get both girls to pose in front of the camera at the same time is harder than you think. They get impatient after just a couple of shots so we usually have to bribe them to sit at some point with treats or something.

Here are the girls after the tree was finished. Just a few minutes to enjoy, then off to bed...