A Tree in ALMOST Every Room

 Many years ago, I jumped onto the "Christmas tree in every room" bandwagon. I had visions of small themed trees in EVERY room of the house. At one point, I had six trees but now am down to five...nowhere close to the number of trees I had originally planned. I certainly have the ornaments to decorate many more trees, but they take so much space to store and so much time to decorate that I've become somewhat dissuaded to pursue my once-lofty goal. 

 In addition to the large tree which sits in our entry way, have two pencil trees which I absolutely love. If I were to buy more trees, they would probably be thin ones like this. They're much easier to store and set up than the large ones. When Bailey was growing up, she had a pencil tree in her room decorated with all of her ornaments. Lately I've been putting one in our living room, decorated with my old world Santa ornaments and a few antique glass balls.

I have another pencil tree on the landing of our staircase. In recent years, I've used gold ornaments on this tree, but I think that next year it may be time for a new theme for this tree. I do like having a tree in this space.

 The tree in our dining room has seen better days, but it still fluffs out fairly well. When Lily was a baby kitty, she knocked this tree down repeatedly so I used to tie it up (actually I tied ALL of our trees) with fishing line. Now that she is older, she doesn't bother the trees so I've been able to hang my grandma's antique Shiny Bright ornaments on it.

The last tree to go up this year was the kitchen tree. I've always liked having a tree in this space, and in years past it has been decorated with cookie cutters. That's not too convenient when you want to bake Christmas cookies! :)

Here's the tree right after I assembled it -- and before I fluffed it up.

Here's my supervisor, Lily!

After a bit of fluffing, the tree was looking much better. This tree has a variety of needles (some short, some long) which I really like. There are also several real pine cones on the tree, which are a bit hard to see in the photo.

Last year Bailey bought me several "snap-lock" type containers at Target for my ornaments. I need to buy more this year! I have all the decorations for my kitchen tree stored in one compartment, which makes it really easy to assemble.

I started with a too-long string of lights but finally got them all on the tree:

Next I added my red apples, which I've had for over 20 years. The apples were originally strung together in a garland, but I cut them apart to create individual ornaments. For some reason, I really like having apples on a Christmas tree!

The apples work well with the Cosmo Cricket ornaments I made a few years ago for a class at Memory Bound. With the apples and style of the ornaments, the tree has sort of a folk-art feel.

There are some tiny red heart ornaments on the tree which I've had since college!

 

I'll admit that each year as I'm working on my trees, I still get the bug to put a tree in EVERY room. I'd really like to put all of my ornaments to use...and the only way to do that is to get more trees. REALLY...how much space would it take to store a few more pencil or table-top trees anyway? Maybe this year I'll finally check out the after-Christmas sales!

jp