Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree Tour

This is a sneak peek at our Family Christmas Tree that I will be sharing on my home tour tomorrow. I thought it would be fun to ‘Rock around the Christmas Tree’ and give you a tour of some of our meaningful ornaments!

Ah, it’s the most wonderful time of the year! Time for holiday home tours of all sorts. Well, I wondered what would be wrong with a Christmas Tree Tour!? Previously, I posted about how to give your tree a designer look, and now I want to show you our family tree… the one covered with nostalgic ornaments!

Our Family tree has an assortment of ornaments that have special meaning to our family. Many from trips we’ve taken, anniversaries celebrated and births of children.

And today is our anniversary! My husband and I are celebrating 36 years together!! (yes, I was 12 yrs old… NOT) Our wedding, on the 18th of December, was exactly one week before Christmas. Not sure what possessed us to plan for that date, but it was CRAZY! The holidays definitely took a back seat that year to the wedding. But it was beautiful, and we honeymooned in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, which is where we ‘discovered’ the Biltmore Mansion in Asheville. Some 19 years later, we read that the year of our honeymoon was the first year the mansion had been decorated for Christmas and opened for holiday tours! Who new? Consequently, this became one of our ‘special’ places… and we have returned several times!!

Are you ready? Let’s Rock around the Christmas Tree!

This is one of the ornaments from our first year! Most of the special ornaments have been carefully kept in their original packaging!!This glass ball is from a set of six received at one of my bridal showers. They have lasted all these years and not one has broken! Isn’t that amazing??We continued to collect at least one new ornament each year. Hallmark began making the collectible ornaments, and this is their Tiffany ornament from 1979.When I was pregnant with our first baby, my best friend saw these adorable angels and, since that was before the days of {almost} everyone finding out the sex of the baby before the birth, she said she just had to get one of each of the pink and blue! And, of course, we had to have a couple of baby’s 1st ornaments! They are 4 years apart and you can see the improvement in Hallmark’s offerings just in that short amount of time… but I love them both!!The next one is a handmade, personalized ornament purchased one year at the local craft show. I’ve always loved his one, and the touch of humor it provides!And, as mentioned before, we have collected ornaments from the trips taken through the years. I have several Biltmore ornaments… this one is porcelain:And one from NYC (our oldest daughter lived there for a couple of years)…On one of those NYC trips, we drove to Martha’s Vineyard to celebrate our anniversary and found this ornament there…This is a fun handmade terracotta cactus from a trip to Scottsdale, Arizona…

And this one comes from Tokyo! A few months ago I posted about our trip to Japan and the ornaments from that trip are highly treasured!!Several years ago, our church celebrated its 100th birthday, and made commemorative ornaments available! What a great idea!!

Well, there are literally hundreds of ornaments on this tree, but these are some of my favorites! I hope you’ve enjoyed rocking around the tree with me today!

Merry Christmas!!