Christmas Decorating Ideas

Archive for the ‘featured’ Category

In my household, the Christmas tree skirt is one of the most critical decisions that needs to be made on our family Christmas tree day. We have 3 different Christmas tree skirts that can be chosen, and it is a huge ordeal to my children. They each have their own favorite Christmas tree skirt and for some reason, it has become a source of several arguments. I always end up settling the dispute for them, and often think about narrowing them down to just one generic Christmas tree skirt, but I never follow through on my thoughts.

For the past 4 years, we have let them choose the Christmas tree skirt every other year. That seemed to satisfy them, but now that my oldest son is in middle school, he probably won’t want a Disney Christmas tree skirt anymore. Of course, he probably won’t like his younger sister wanting to put her favorite Pooh bear one down either. It could be an interesting year. I’m thinking about conveniently losing them, and buying a new and plain Christmas tree skirt so that there is no longer any arguments. My husband is in favor of that idea.

So, I have decided to go shopping in search of a neutral Christmas tree skirt that will suit everyone’s needs. That may be easier said than done. I walked down the aisles of Christmas decorations at Target, looking through the available skirts. Nothing really jumped out to get my attention, but I suppose that is what I’m hoping to avoid anyway. I never knew that it would be that hard to find a Christmas tree skirt. I knew that I wanted something red, and something with a design. But, I had no idea at how many designs there were on the market. You name it, it is available. I finally settled on a Christmas tree skirt that had shiny snowflakes on it. It was a very attractive one that I thought all members of my family would approve of. I was even certain that the cat would be just as comfortable sleeping on this Christmas tree skirt as the other ones. I’m just hoping that my kids don’t find this new Christmas tree skirt offensive and throw fits about having their precious Disney tree skirts replaced. I will be
quick to point out that the presents will all still be the same, no matter if they are being placed on the old Christmas tree skirt or the new one. Perhaps this new Christmas tree skirt will create more memories, and close the door on the old arguments that had existed.

Five years ago, after watching my husband struggle for entirely too long with unwrapping the hopelessly tangled Christmas lights, I was pretty fed up with the entire concept of decorating. Hours later, we had managed to get the lights on the tree and in working condition. By the time we were done, neither one of us was in the mood to put any ornaments on it. Looking through a circular one morning, I saw a beautiful artificial tree that advertised that it was prelit. Wow! That meant that there would be no tangling of lights to fight with every year. Although we already had our Christmas tree up and decorated, I rushed to that store to take advantage of the sale. An hour later, I came home with a prelit Christmas tree packed into the back of my SUV.

The next December, I was actually eager to get started on the Christmas decorating. I went to the attic and brought down the box that contained our brand new prelit Christmas tree. My husband was skeptical about how nice looking it would be, but I knew that he was secretly pleased that he wouldn’t have to struggle with detangling the lights. We struggled with getting the prelit Christmas tree put together, as we’d never put together an artificial tree before, but it ended up looking very nice when we were done. The real test came when we needed to plug it in and see how it looked. I plugged it in and suddenly, the prelit Christmas tree lit up. My husband smiled with relief realizing that it really did look nice. We hung up the decorations and while I had worried that there would be cords or wires poking out since it was a prelit Christmas tree, there were none. The lights and cords were glued securely to the branches alleviating the fears that it would look “too fake”.

Throughout the holiday season, we had numerous parties and get-togethers at our house. We didn’t tell anyone that we had purchased a prelit Christmas tree or that it wasn’t real. To be quite honest, unless you knew or studied it up close, you would not have any way of knowing that it was a prelit Christmas tree. No one even asked about it, but we did get many compliments on how nicely the tree was decorated. One relative asked my husband if he’d had any more battles with hanging the Christmas lights this year and my husband smugly replied “no”. We smiled at each other. Our prelit Christmas tree had been a wonderful investment and was our little secret.

Nowadays you can buy lots of styles of Christmas tree, both articificial and real.  One of my favorite ones is the fiber optic Christmas tree. These do not always have the most naturalistic look, but they make up for that fact with a good dash of flash and flair.  You can probably find a fiber optic Christmas tree in basically any size and style you want, and almost all of them look fantastic. They have glowing, changing miniature Christmas lights, fairly high-quality construction that guarantees they will work year after year, and often a built in Christmas tree topper.
Read the rest of this entry »