Christmas in our home!

I love decorating for Christmas!  When I was younger I always thought that when I had my own home I would have a big gorgeous Christmas tree with white lights and coordinating decorations--all the ornaments would match and all that jazz.  Well, that's not the case.  My tree has colored lights and a whole hodge modge of ornaments and I LOVE it!!  The ornaments have special meaning and I love unpacking them each year because as I unwrap them, each one brings back special memories.  

Even the multi-colored balls hold a special memory!  For the first several years of our marriage we were in college and  in a small town home and always went away for Christmas.  We never put up a big Christmas tree...just a small table top one with a few special ornaments.  Matt graduated college and landed his first "real" job in December '05.  So, shortly after Christmas we were buying our first home.  My mother-in-law and I happened to go into Wal-mart shortly after Christmas and found all these packages of Christmas ornaments for (if I remember correctly) about $0.10 a box!!  I just remember they were CRAZY cheap!!  We picked up a bunch of them knowing that the next Christmas I was going to have a big Christmas tree to decorate in my new home!!!  As the kids have grown we've added lots of homemade ornaments and other keepsake ornaments to our tree.  My mother-in-law also passed on some very pretty and very special ornaments that her grandmother made.  It may not be all matchy-matchy, but I LOVE our tree!

Our family's Christmas tree!

My best friend gave us this ornament our first Christmas.

Brannon's 1st Christmas ornament

Blake's 1st Christmas ornament

I've started getting an ornament with their picture on it every year.  I love seeing how they've grown over the years!

One of the homemade ornaments--made by Brannon when he was in PreK.

These snowflake ornaments were made by Matt's great-grandmother!

Elissa's 1st Christmas ornament

This ornament was given to Matt when he made is profession of faith.  It has his name engraved on it.  

My grandmother has given us lots of beautiful ornaments.  This is one that she gave us after we moved into our house.

These angels were also made by Matt's great-grandmother!

I could really keep going with our ornaments.  There are so many on that tree that are special to me and our family!  And this year we get to add another baby's 1st Christmas ornament as we celebrate our little Nate's 1st Christmas!  He's at such a fun age for it too!!  I can't wait to see him playing in all the wrapping paper on Christmas morning!

Here are a few of our other decorations this year:

Found this free printable thanks to Pinterest!  Love it!

Took some of the scraps from our Christmas tree and  put this together for our front door.

My dining room tree.  So, I guess I do have one tree that has coordinating decorations!  I also learned how to take a "glowing" picture of your Christmas tree thanks to Pinterest!

Merry Christmas!!