Our life on a tree...

Our Christmas tree has always been very special to us. It represents so many things to us. A funny memory... our first Christmas Eve in the appartment we came home from the service and it had fallen over! It was an older one my grandmother let us have & was not too sturdy. What a way to start things out...


The next Christmas we got a new tree (still in the apartment.) We wanted to string the lights all intertwined like my brother always instructed (dictated) ;) that I did on our family tree. Well, my sweet husband wanted to be the one who put the lights on and wanted me to trust him to do it right. (one of the many "we're a team and I trust you" moments in the beginning of marriage.) He did it right...in fact...he did it so well that he ran out of lights while he was still on the bottom row!! No joke! This was the most exhausting thing ever...we ended up with 7,000 lights in our 2 bedroom apartment! We had to turn the back half of the tree off because it heated the place up so much...and it was still hot! Seriously!

Now our tree sits in our home and we have always enjoyed it's beauty.


But our tree has come to mean even more to us. Each year that we've been married, we've bought an ornament (or 2) that has represented the year for us. It's always been something special to us...like a new house, or SMU ornaments for law school, or a cruise ship, or baby announcements, or A&M ornaments...


I have always loved this ornament my parents bought us. It says "Our 1st Christmas Together" and has the year 2000 on the back. Such a special memory to me....this was our first.

Looking back over 2009, we had a bit of a difficult time trying to decide what ornament would represent our year. It was a good year filled with God's blessings, but the significant pieces of our year were things of difficulty (not including one of the most difficult ends to the year either). We just weren't sure what to do with an ornament that would "represent" our year. So...we came up with 2 things...


First, these 2 precious ornaments on our tree represent the year 2001...when we got Aggie and Sully as puppies. As you know, Aggie died over July 4th weekend...so in her honor...Jason added her dog tag to her ornament. The tears flowed when I pulled these out of the box to hang on our tree...and they flowed again when we put them away with her dog tag hanging on them. BUT...I love that it's a sweet memory of my precious Aggie-girl.

THEN...on to our ornament for this year - 2009. We chose this one.


Green is the first significant part of this ornament. The color represents money. The gift box is the 2nd part of this ornament...it represents God's grace to us. It's a little hard to talk about this ornament because it represents some major mistakes we made financially over the last few years and the realization of it all that we had this year. So, without all the detail...the Lord provided for us and I am forever grateful and thankful for this gift of grace. This ornament will always be a reminder of how far we've come.

Our life on our tree...

Let's see what 2010 holds for our tree! Happy New Year...