Christmas tree

Four years ago we had a pretty bad experience with a real Christmas tree and decided we would stay away from the real thing for awhile. We go to Indy for Christmas - usually for about 5 or 6 nights. When we came home we walked into the biggest mess. At some point while we were gone the tree tipped over...including the water bucket. The water had soaked into the carpet and the tree had left sap all over the carpet. At the time we had 2 cats and they had a wonderful time with it while we were gone because there were ornaments all over the house...even upstairs! Yes, they actually dragged ornaments upstairs to play with. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall watching them have the time of their lives. So the following year we wanted to get a fake tree but really didn't have the money to spend on it. My mother-in-law had just bought a new tree and was throwing her old tree away so we thought we would just take it and it would have to do for a year until we could buy a new one. It's not that it's an ugly tree, but it's small and a little sparse. There's a few branches that are broken and have to be wired on each year and the needles fall off all over the place - my neighbor Dan was over last night and asked, "Is it a real tree?"
me: no
Dan: then why are there needles all over the floor
The tree was good for a year being that we didn't have the money to buy one and I'm very thankful for it, but it kind of reminds me of the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree. Okay, it's not that bad, but it's clearly time to get a new tree.
So sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving I found a beautiful tree at JoAnn's - I was so excited because it was pre-lit and only $149. I told Brian about it and he said no, so I pouted for a couple of weeks. Not just pouted though - I was pissed!
On Thanksgiving Brian's mom and I finally got to Brian that we needed to get a tree. So I planned on getting to JoAnn's first thing on black Friday. As I was looking in the ads I found a better tree at JCPenny's - it was a $350 tree that was on sale for $108. It was 7.5' tall and pre-lit with 1000 lights. So my mom and I show up there bright and early and got the tree. They offered to load it in our vehicle, but we had gotten a pretty good parking spot and didn't want to move the car to the door so we decided we'd lug it through the parking lot to the car and load it ourselves. Well, we had my mom's car which is a Dodge Charger and the only place the box was going to fit was in the back seat, but we couldn't get it to go in because of the cars on both sides of her car. So we had to back the car out into the middle of the aisle to get it in - we of course had people flocking to our parking spot only to see us pull back in to the parking spot and get out of the car.
So we came back from Indy Friday night and Saturday morning we started decorating the house for Christmas - Brian outside, me inside. I was so excited - I had the Christmas music blaring and I was putting together my beautiful tree. I got it all put together and I plugged it in and it had multi-colored lights - I like clear lights on my Christmas tree. I could have cried! I put the tree back in the box and begged Brian to come down from the roof so we could return it and look for another one. When he was finally finished with what he was doing we took the tree back and went all over trying to find a tree that I liked and Brian was willing to pay for - that didn't happen - we went to Lowes, Menards, JoAnn's, Target, K-mart and Old Time Pottery and came home empty handed!
I finally just decided to give up - we just weren't going to have a tree this year. But on Sunday we went to our usual place for Sunday dinner - Leenie's and they were putting up their tree. I decided that if I couldn't have a new tree this year then I was going to get new ornaments and then buy a new tree either after Christmas this year or next year, but this would be the last year for this pathetic hand-me-down (no offense Linda - my MIL).
So on Tuesday I shopped for my new ornaments and I was on cloud-9, it was awesome picking out all new ornaments. I have had red and silver for about 4 years and before that it was purple and silver. I have never liked gold - I would always wonder why anyone would want to use gold, but this year I am REALLY in to gold with red and green, but not just any green - I'm liking the lime green - something I started liking when we did our candy cane craft at MOPS.
So my decorations look beautiful! Notice I didn't say tree? My decorations will look much better next year on my NEW Christmas tree - right honey? But until then, here's some pics.