Christmas Tree and Homemade Ornaments

Last week, my husband and I went out to Adams Fairacre Farms to pick out my first real Christmas tree - who knew there were so many choices?!  I felt like a kid in a candy store, hopping from one stand of trees to another.  What's a Balsam Fir?  What's a Douglas Fir? What's the difference?  How come I can't have that tree?  Why don't they carry Spruces?  How tall is our ceiling again?  Good thing there weren't that many people around, because I really was that kid dragging his parent around to look at just one more tree!

In the end, it came down to hubby's choice - the perfectly shaped, tall Fir of some sort, and my choice - the shorter fatty boombatty tree, also some type of Fir that may take up half the room.  I win. :-)

I also found out that I love Spruce trees, but that they don't do as well chained up in a house with a bucket of water, especially when they've been pre-cut for a tree farm.  Maybe next year, we'll go cut our own Spruce!

After a week of waiting for the branches to open up to see how big this sucker really is, and then carefully decorating it so that only non-glass ornaments adorn the toddler-reachable areas of the tree, my Big Fat Christmas Tree is up, and I love it!  My favorite glass ornaments are sitting nice and high, out of reach of both boy and dog.

This here is a knock-off of a Santa ornament I saw at Pier One last year.  I had a bunch of old ornaments from my mother-in-law, with the (probably) toxic paint chipping off.  So, I spray-painted the lot, and did a little creative decorating to a few of them.

I wanted a can of lime green spray paint, but all I could find was this slightly olive, slightly puke-y color, but the Miss M&M still came out fine.

The big purply one is a gift from my MIL, from the Smithsonian.  The gold one in back is one of my own, after I ran out of clever ideas for ornaments.

Here's a fun Santa from Pier One.

I saw this idea from somewhere, to create a snow-capped tree from puffy paint.

Mr. Frosty is an old ornament repainted in leftover white spray-paint.

Again, I saw the inspiration for this Snitch ornament from somewhere, and hacked together my own version.

Did I mention I love my fatty boom batty tree?