{Our} Home for the Holidays: Our Tree Day

I hope you all have been enjoying the {Our} Home for the Holidays series as much as I have!  It's been so much fun visiting with all our guest bloggers and learning about their favorite holiday traditions.  I figured it was about time I share with you all about one of the special traditions in the Artsy Family.

Our TREE DAY and PIZZA PICNIC

I absolutely LOVE decorating for Christmas, and the central piece of decor for me is the tree!  We have a sunken living room with a 10' ceiling, so when it comes to trees, bigger is better!  {Although, we have learned the hard way that they always look bigger in the house than in the field...five years ago, we cut down a massive blue spruce we now call "The Beast" that ended up not fitting in our living room}.

We really enjoy going to a local tree farm to cut one down; for the first few years we used white pines, but later switched to Douglas Fir, which hubs and I both like better.

Each year, it gets more difficult finding one that's tall enough and not too sparse looking.  Apparently, most people like smaller trees.  This year, we only had about 6 or 7 to choose from in the whole field that were the height we wanted, and none of them were our perfect tree...so, we ended up getting an eight foot one that was precut and Little Crafter just pretended he cut it down.

Once we get our tree, we take it home, put it in the stand, and string the lights {which is always my job since my dad, the expert, taught me well}.  By that time, we're usually hungry, but we have decorations all over the place including on the table, so we started a tradition years ago of having a pizza picnic on the floor in front of the tree.  I couldn't find any of the oldest pictures, but here are a few of Christmases past...

Here's Mama and Little Crafter in 2008 when he was just 4 months old!  Look how tiny he was!  And how ugly our green carpet was...ugggh!

Here's one from 2010; last year Little Crafter insisted we all wear our "dancing hats" to the picnic.

And here's a shot from this year.  See what I mean?  Big tree!

Once dinner is over, we can start to work on decorating the tree with garland and ornaments.

I love that LC is old enough this year to help!  He had a lot of fun putting some of the oranments he made and painted in special places.  Isn't this too cute for words?  And yes, those are Ravens pjs...{goooo RAVENS!  9-3 and leading our division}!

He also had a ball decorating his own miniature tree up in his bedroom...

I think he made at least half of the ornaments!

And, our tree isn't complete these days without the Polar Express electric train my grandmother bought for Little Crafter last Christmas.  He has had SO much fun playing with it already...is there anything cuter that watching a little boy drive his train? 

Here's a look at the finished product:

Ahhhhh, I just LOVE Christmas, don't you?  Now it's time to wrap some gifts and get them under the tree!

But Christmas isn't the only holiday we're gearing up for in the Artsy house...check out my guest post over at Love Bug Living today to see what else we've been up to!  And don't forget to stop by the {Our} Home for the Holidays and Shine on Fridays parties for a ton of great seasonal crafts, recipes, traditions, and other projects.

Happy My-Birthday-Month!

PS - Don't forget, the Ornament Giveaway is coming up next Wednesday!