december 7th

Last night around 10pm I realized that I had not taken my photo for the day. So, here is our tree as taken from my desk at 10:05 pm last night.... :-)

Yes, we have a little bitty tree. That tree has been with us since the Christmas before Jeff and I got engaged. It was my tree in my apartment that we bought for a Christmas party I was planning on hosting. We never got rid of it because we always seemed to find a place for it. The condo Jeff and I bought when we first got married was tiny so the tree was a perfect size. Shortly after getting married, we got transferred to the Houston, Texas area. And although our place was much larger and we had room for a big tree... our tree was in the back of the house so this tree was put in the window of the front bedroom so you could see it from the outside.

When we got transferred back to Chicago, it spent a year in storage but then came out again for Alex's first Christmas so we could put it up on a table, out of his reach. Then we went back to Texas (this time the Dallas area) and we had a playroom for the kids. This little tree went in there for the kids to decorate with all of the handmade ornaments.

Three years ago we broke down and got the big giant pre-lit tree for our house. Within that next year, we found out that we were moving back to Chicago. That Christmas we had no tree since we moved over the holidays and spent Christmas day with my parents in Missouri.

So... that brings us to last year... our first official Christmas back in Chicago. We weren't quite sure how we were going to get that big huge tree to fit in our city-sized place... but we moved furniture around and decided to give it a shot. Well... we got the bottom two sections together and then we discovered that the top third of the tree was NOWHERE to be found! We had lost the top of our tree during the move!

The kids were beginning to get concerned that we were not going to have a tree so Jeff rushed downstairs to find the little tree. We put it on an end table in the kids' room and got them started with the decorating. We had thought about getting another larger tree... but this worked so well that we used the little tree again this year.

So, that's it, one little last minute photo and a whole bunch of rambling! :-)