Trimming the tree

Saturday we went up to Draper and borrowed some decorations from Jon's parents. Karen had told us they weren't decorating this year because the back half of the house is currently torn up and we could borrow some stuff if we wanted. I didn't really think we needed much for our house, but we did need stuff for our tree. We ended up coming home with a bunch of giant pine cones, rusty jingle bells, an assortment of rusty metal stars, and some white berry things. Jon and I decided we would do the tree in rust and red with accents of white from the berries. I wanted some red berries, so we decided that we should just buy some at one of the many craft stores around. Unfortunately I was very particular about the red berries I wanted. I wanted them to be the same style as the white berries we had borrowed from the Wares. We stopped by the Joann's and Michael's up in Draper, but neither of them had what we were looking for. We decided we would stop by a few places a little closer to home that might have them. We tried Hobby Lobby, Taipan, and Roberts and didn't find what I was looking for. We decided we would stop by Kmart to get some red balls, so we could still have some red on the tree and looked for berries there too with no luck. We got our red glass balls and decided we might as well try the Quilted Bear by the Kmart as one last attempt at finding the red berries. After wandering around a bit I spotted a little area that looked promising. It had wreaths with the right type of berries, but nothing like the picks with the berries we had got from Karen. Jonathan noticed one long garland of the berries in what seemed to be a little deeper red than I was originally thinking, but they matched pretty good with the glass balls. I decided that I could just cut the garland up into pieces and that would work. After driving all over and going to what felt like a million places we finally found what we were after.

Sunday after church we decorated the tree. It was fun. Stringing the rusty bells on the wire and wrapping that around the tree was kind of a pain and my hands got super dirty, but I think our tree ended up looking really neat. We set up our camera (a Christmas present to ourselves that we opened early) to take a picture every 2 minutes as we were decorating. The battery died not long after we started, so I strung most of the bells while the battery was charging. Jon put the pictures together into a little video. For some reason I can't figure out how to put the video in the middle of the post, so it is down at the bottom.

After the tree was done I had fun playing with the camera and taking the close-up pictures of the tree.

Here is my self portrait :)

The tree turned out good and Jon takes every chance he gets to turn on the lights so we can enjoys its full grandeur.