Our Special Ornaments

The reason that my posts have been kind of sparse of late is because my previous camera died, and for a week or two I didn't take any pictures. Then my brother let us use his camera, so thankfully I did get pictures of Christmas, but it's taken me a while to get them from him. I hope you'll forgive me for a few Christmas posts since I use this blog for our family journal.

When I was little we used to make ornaments for the tree. One year my sister and I used Christmas cookie cutters to make salt dough ornaments, which we baked and painted. Here's my Santaand her free-hand candy cane.

In college I put my mad skilz to work again as a gift for everyone who participated in our ward choir. I was the director--to this day, one of my favorite callings I've ever had. I had so many spiritual experiences as I prayed for inspiration! (See, the stake told us we could ONLY sing hymns, and at first I was really bummed and figured we would be boring. But then I decided to embrace the council and do some arranging of hymns. Twelfth ward alumni will tell you we were anything but boring! But I digress.)

When Nathan and I were on our honeymoon in Jackson, WY we hit all the little tourist shops where everything is so neat, and so expensive. We could only afford two souvenirs: a poster of the Tetons and an ornament.
Then Nathan had the awesome idea that we should have a tradition of collecting a new ornament each year from whatever major trip we'd taken that year. On the back of this circle of geese I wrote the date and where we got it. That year we also addedthis cute jingle bell ornament that we got as a gift from my Grammy. I wrote the date on that too.

In 2007 we took a trip to Disneyland that we'd "won" for listening to a time share sales pitch.I was 5 months pregnant at the time, and we enjoyed having a little babymoon before we became a family of three.

In 2008 we took a 10-day trip to Oregon to see Nathan's parents and his Grammy. We loved seeing them and sharing Annalee's first Christmas with them, but the most memorable part of the trip was the horrible weather.So that year we shopped the after Christmas sales at Target and got what we thought was a fitting token. Nathan's parents also gave Annalee an ornament that year.Last year we took a 10-day summer vacation to Santa Rosa, CA with my sister and her family. June is not the best time to look for ornaments in San Francisco, but we found something that only needed a ribbon to become one. (It's kind of hard to see in the picture, but the bell has the Golden Gate bridge on top of it.)

The rest of the tree is decorated with red and gold, since those are my favorite Christmas colors.
I love our tree and all the special memories it holds!