Our winter solstice tree...

Finally, we all seem to be feeling better (well, except for Nicholas, but he's almost there). So back to blogging.

We have a winter solstice tree. It is yet another after Christmas tradition that we have started that I love.

We have 3 Christmas trees (4 if you count the tiny one in the hallway between the girls' rooms, but I don't). The nicest one was my parents. It is an artificial tree that is beautiful (they really do exist). Heaven knows how much they paid for it. They got it when I was 13, and it still looks as lovely as it did then. So all that nonsense about how artificial trees aren't eco-firendly is a bunch of bunk, in my opinion. It is our family tree, the one that lives in our family room and the one that has the most presents underneath it. It is decorated with all different kinds of ornaments-ones the girls have made, ones from our vacations (we always get ornaments wherever we go), ornaments from our first Christmas together, things like that. It has colored lights and a popcorn string made of styrofoam packing peanuts that my mom and dad strung the first year that they were married. The tree topper is a star, because my grandma always had a star on her tree.

Our second tree is what we lovingly call "the pretty tree." It is meant to look pretty through the window. It has white lights (to match our ourdoor lights). The ornaments all go together (I got them several years ago at Kmart, they are part of a Martha Stewart collection). Most of them are pink. And then we put all of our Wizard of Oz ornaments on it. So we sometimes call it the "Wizard of Oz" tree. The topper for it is Glinda, and then we have ornaments of all the major characters (except for the Wicked Witch, which the girls and I have decided needs to be remedied).

The third tree is a real live Christmas tree. I decided two years ago that, while I loved our trees, I wanted the girls to have a memory of going and picking out a real tree. We live right down the road from Morrison's Christmas Tree Farm, so off we trek one weekend in December. I have fallen in love with Norwegian Fir trees from this experience (they don't lose too many needles and they are a lovely, old-fashioned looking tree). This is our literary tree. All of the ornaments on it must be related to a book. Tinkerbell is our tree topper, and we have a train that goes around it. It has colored lights and red beads for popcorn. The first year that we had it, I decided that I wanted to really string popcorn for it. This task proved too difficult for me. They all just broke to pieces.

All of the presents under the literary tree, as you might have guessed, are books.

When Christmas is over and we take all of the trees down, we take the real tree (in the stand) outside and stake it down. (We discovered that because it is so windy where we live, it is best to really tie it down well.) This becomes our winter solstice tree.

We decorate it with various things. Nick makes a suet ball out of melted lard and birdseed. Put a Chirstmas hook in it and it will stay when it hardens. This year he also made some in the muffin pan and we set them around the tree. We also take pine cones and cover them in peanut butter, then cover them in birdseed. (This is a fun task for the girls, but messy-we make them wear latex gloves.) And we cut up apples and oranges and hang them.

We have all kinds of birds come to our tree and we truly love watching all of them. I would love to have more wildlife-perhaps a deer or some squirrels which we know live here-but I've never seen them eating anything.


A good book to go along with this is The Night Tree by Eve Bunting. It is a Christmas book but I save it until we do our solstice tree.

It was a dream of mine since I was a kid to have this tree. I read about it in one of my Christmas books and I just thought that it sounded so fun. It is as fun as I imagined.