O Christmas Tree...

This was our first year decorating the artificial alpine tree that I bought last year after Christmas.

My mom bought one years ago and we always kind of made fun of it...affectionately calling it Mom's "stick tree". But that type of tree kind of grew on me after awhile and I ended up really wanting to buy one last year. I looked all over for one I could get for a decent price and couldn't find any for under $80. Then, while visiting CJ's parents in Ohio for Christmas and shopping with his mom at Pat Cattan's craft store, I found one on sale for $40! (Oh how I love Pat Cattan's! I wish we had one in western New York! I wish we had a Sonic drive-in too, but that's another story.)

The really nice thing about this type of artificial tree is that it takes up less space than your average artificial tree. Plus, the branches are bendy and after Christmas you can just un-decorate it, bend all the branches down to make it even thinner, and just have it in a corner as a rustic decorative element year round.

CJ and I changed up our Christmas tree color scheme a bit this year. In past years it's been silver and blue, with blue and those super-white LED lights. This year I wanted to warm the colors up a bit. CJ bought the "warm" white LED lights. Blue is still a major player...but we switched to turquoise from the royal/colbalt blue. And we swapped in gold for silver, and added in some sparkley chocolate brown. We actually had decided on this new color scheme last year when we bought all new ornaments on clearance after the holidays. I'm not sure if the turquoise and brown thing is played out yet, but I am still in love with it.

We bought new hooks last year too that are lovely, elegant little copper curly cues. So much nicer than those plain old wire hooks.