Yuletide Cheer

 It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas at the Kress household. 

With the cold weather, packed malls and all the holiday festivities filling our calendars, it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas, too.  We attended our second Christmas gathering this past Friday.  It was my better half's office party at his boss's beautiful home in our hometown.  We always have fun at this party and this year was no exception.  It's such a tight-knit family of an office and the gatherings are always full of lots of laughter and story-telling by all.  One of the traditions is an ornament exchange with no limit on steals!  I had ornaments stolen from me quite a few times, but ended up with a very pretty ornament, which has already found a home on our tree.

Its ornaments like these that make our tree the eclectic one that it is.  We love it that way!  We each grew up with Christmas trees like this, too.  The very color-coordinated ones with pretty matching ribbons, ornaments and bows are pretty to look at, but have no place where we live. 

Dan came away with this snowman ornament this year:

And I ended up with this very sparkly one.  I love sparkly things!

The beauty of it is that both of these new ornaments go with all our other ornaments, like this one, which reminds me of our Maui honeymoon:

And this one, which is very special to me because it was handmade by both my grandma and my great-grandma:

 
All of those also go with this one, another special one:

The Barbie ornament!!  Kind of strange, you say?  That's one of the reasons I love it!  That combined with the fact that it was made and given to me by my great-grandma in 1985 gives me much joy when I put it on the tree each year.

It's fun decorating our tree each year because most ornaments, like those above, are very special to us.  None of them match, but they all go together to make our very unique Christmas tree.  Just looking at the tree from where I'm sitting, I'm reminded of relatives, friends, our wedding and honeymoon, Christmas gatherings, and many other events from different phases of our lives.

12 days until Christmas!!  I have some shopping to do...