I come from a family that believes in the sanctity of the Christmas Tree. It was and still is of extreme importance to pick the best tree you could find. Now mind you our idea of the best tree is not exactly everyones idea of the best tree. My husband and I go round and round about it every year since my family raised me to believe that the best tree meant that you could barely fit it in your car or even on top of your car. If it scraped the ceiling than it was barely close to big enough. He on the other hand, begs me to just once get a tree that we can actually fit through the door without doing damage. He’s a funny guy.

Maybe not this big but I have to say New Yorkers know how to do a Christmas tree right.

Being an interior designer I notice all of the gorgeous trees I see in magazines and in street windows and take note of how well they are done in regard to balance, proportion, scale, color, lighting, thematic content etc.

And there are some really amazing, and very designer-y trees out there.

However my tree……… while its BIG, it is what could be described as a mess. It has every kind of ornament you can imagine on it. It is not terribly designer-y. Even as much as I would like it to be sometimes. The struggle is real as I go to open the stored ornament boxes and lights. Now there are some really beautiful ornaments and lights in these boxes. I bet if I put my mind to it, I could find a theme in it all. But there is a lot more to this story.  You see I have been collecting an ornament a year since I was in my twenties and got my very first tree in my college apartment. I also have a few ornaments from when I was young. My husband also has a few from his childhood.

When my kids were born we started a tradition of going to the store and they would each pick out one special ornament for that years Christmas tree. They would carefully put their initials and current year on the bottom of their special ornament with the thought that one day, when they have their own apartment, I will ship them their box of childhood ornaments.

So on the night we get our HUGE tree, it has become a tradition to go through the ornament boxes as a family and find our special ornaments and place them on the tree. My kids are now 25 and 26 and with all that John and I have collected, we need a really BIG tree to fit it all on. There is method to my madness. It’s a special night and every ornament comes with a memory of a Christmas past. It usually takes us a few hours to get them all placed. When finished we watch our annual viewing of “ELF”, because like me Buddy, the main character, had a fine appreciation of a good Christmas tree.

And here is the final result.

 

Yes, its not going to be photographed anytime soon for any design magazine but that’s ok. We love our mess of a Christmas tree and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Messy Christmas to you all and hope you have a lovely holiday.

Holland

 

Images courtesy findinglovely.com, New York Magazine.com, infoniac.com, izeko.hubpages.com, imdb.com

 

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