O Christmas Tree

The holiday season is here! Alex and I normally like to put up our Christmas tree on the day after Thanksgiving, but we have been busy the past few weeks with photo shoots for friends, and I have been finishing up the fall semester at college. We finally got around to putting up the tree last night.

When we moved into our apartment, we inherited this small artificial tree from my mom. It's about four feet tall, and it worked great in our apartment because we didn't have room to store a full-size tree. We want to have a full-size tree now that we're in our house, but we're waiting until the after Christmas sales this year to buy one.

The tree is so small that it only takes one string of lights to cover the whole thing!

We use Philips cool white LED lights. We love how bright the LED lights are.

The color scheme of our tree is white, silver, and gold with touches of red. We bought most of our ornaments at Ikea last year. My favorites are the straw ones, especially the Yule Goats. Alex is part German, Norwegian, and Swedish, and I'm part German. The Yule Goat is a fun little celebration of our heritage-- it's one of the oldest Christmas symbols and traditions in Northern Europe and Scandinavia.

Our dogs always hang out with us while we decorate the Christmas tree. I think that they're more confused by it than anything else. Rascal, our Miniature Schnauzer, humored us by allowing us to put a Santa hat on him. He's so patient with his silly humans!

I think that they thought that some of the ornaments were treats.

This pair of owls was a new addition this year. My mom got them for me at the Macy's after Christmas sale last year for about $2 each.

Here it is! I still need to make a tree skirt. I'm thinking of making a burlap and lace one like this one. I think that it would go nicely with our color scheme.

We also hung up our stockings on the wall since we don't have a mantel. Alex's mom, Autumnforest, made these gorgeous stockings for us years ago!