We Wish You a Merry Christmas, Forest Style

This is going to be a different kind of blog post for me. If you only come to my blog because you like to see paper crafting creations, I apologize, but many of my online friends have been pressuring me to show pictures of the forest I’ve created in our home, so that is my intent today. Since we have so many Christmas trees (hence the name forest), I will only be showing a few of them. And the ones I do show will actually appear in four different posts, hopefully all today.

Here’s the first picture. I’m posting it first so that you can listen to the carolers sing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” as you take a tour of some of the other trees in our home.

And by the way, this tree doesn’t count as one of the 38 Christmas trees we have this year because it doesn’t have any lights on it. They only count in they are lit.

The next tree is one of our newest trees. I started collecting ornaments for it in celebration of our 25th wedding anniversary. Every ornament on this tree is a 1983 dated ornament (which is the year we got married). The angel on top is a 1983 angel from the same designer who created an angel for the Carters who were in the White House at the time.

As you can see from this picture, some of the 1983 ornaments are quite traditional, while others are not.

This is our International Tree. It is one of my favorites. It has ornaments from over 25 different countries. The sombrero on top came from Mexico.

Our Vacation tree features ornaments we have collected as we’ve vacationed across the United States. Mickey Mouse joined our tree when we visited Disney World in Florida and Minnie Mouse arrived a few years later when we visited Disneyland in California.

I love the actual cork from a beach town in California and the golden ring from the carousel that was part of the World’s Fair in Spokane Washington.

I also love the ornate Chicago skyline from our visit to Navy Pier.

We have several trees in our kitchen. The largest tree has Coca Cola ornaments on it. My paternal grandfather delivered Coke products during the depression to support his family. This tree reminds me of him. One of the smaller trees has McDonald's ornaments on it.

And here’s one of the Dining Room Trees, completely filled with Gingerbread ornaments. One of the prized possessions on it is the measuring cup that my inlaws had when they got married over fifty years ago.

While this picture doesn’t show a tree, it does show a very important part of our Christmas tradition… our Hallmark ornament collection. I have an ornament from every year that Hallmark has been making them, beginning in 1973. Each of our three children have an ornament beginning with the year they were born. They are suspended from our foyer ceiling.

The tour continues shortly...