This past weekend was devoted to that holiday activity of procuring and decorating the Christmas tree.  We have a small house, but refuse to limit ourselves to a small tree, so furniture gets moved and access to the kitchen from the living room becomes somewhat limited in the name of holiday cheer.

For years we had purple lights on our tree, but as those lights needed to be replaced,  I couldn’t find strands of just purple Christmas lights anymore. I’d started making the switch to all white when I stumbled upon purple lights – LED ones no less! – at Big Lots this year. I snatched up a few strands, which Edie decided should be the lights wrapped around the trunk of the tree.  She also thought we should use the smaller white lights on the trunk and then come around the outside with the big white lights I bought last year, which is how our tree came to be covered in three types of lights.
I find I don’t use as many lights when I use the large white ones. This year’s tree only has about 600 or so lights on it, with about 200 or so of each type of light. Edie, who cut the tree down herself this year, took charge off decorating, leaving the application of lights,  fragile ornaments and final touches – like the garland to me, while she supervised.

I think she did a wonderful job, didn’t she?
The tree is up and some of the house is decorated, with the boxes of Christmas decorations currently cluttering up the living room, so there’s very little room to walk (or sit) currently.  I wasn’t going to go all out on decorating this year, but since I pulled out all the Christmas decoration boxes to get to what I did want up, I might as well put some festive touches throughout the house.  As Edie pointed out, with the weather so warm recently, the decorations help it feel more like Christmas, which is fast approaching.