Christmastime is here

If that title doesn't get Charlie Brown Christmas music running through your head, I don't think we can be friends. Just kidding, of course.
Now that Thanksgiving is over, I'm ready to embrace Christmas, rampant commercialism and all. Sammy and I have been listening to the Christmas radio station in the car as we do errands, and last week Ryan brought home a Christmas tree for us to decorate for Family Home Evening. It's the first year we've actually had a tree, and we love it!

Christmas 2009

Christmas 2011- quite an improvement!

Ryan and I strung the lights and the beaded strings around the tree (which was harder than I thought it would be). Then we let Sam put the ornaments on wherever he wanted.

But, being the control freak that I am, I spread them out so they looked better after he went to bed.

Below is a picture of Sam playing with two ornaments. I believe they are the Nutcracker and Clara from the Nutcracker collection. 

When I was a kid, the best part of decorating the tree was playing with the ornaments. I know some people like to decorate their tree with globes of various colors, or candy canes, or something like that, but we always had a mishmash of ornaments that my parents had collected over the years and my sister and I had made in school. We had a Rosebud sled (the significance of which I didn't get as a kid), some  musical instruments, gingerbread men that retained their smell year after year, and some plastic angels, to name a few. My mom now has more ornaments than can actually fit on a Christmas tree, so some get left off. It always makes me a little sad, knowing that one of my favorite ornaments from childhood didn't make the cut.

The Reynolds Christmas tree, however, only has a handful of ornaments. My mom bought a Nutcracker set for me, because those were our very favorites as kids. Ryan's dad carved a rocking horse for Sam's first Christmas, which we hang up pretty high so he can't get to it. There's a snowflake with Sam's picture on it that the Nursery leaders made last year- Sam's eyes are all red because it was his first month in Nursery and he cried A LOT when we left him there. And there is the Mommy and Daddy clay elf ornament, with a little string to hang the "elf babies" on- we added Baby Brudder this year, although we haven't written his name on it yet because we still don't have a name for the poor kid. And that's it for ornaments. I'm sure in a few years we'll have added a lot more to our collection. For now, though, we're just happy to sit in the glow of our tree and be reminded of the Christmas memories we already have.