Our Christmas Tree

When I was little, my mom would get a different ornament for me and my sisters every year. She usually tried to make them relate to the past year - the year I worked as a junior tour guide
at the museum, my ornament was a dinosaur with Christmas lights on him. This was a tradition I loved and wanted to pass on to my own kids. After a few years of trying to find ornaments that were 'special', I met Jodie, a lovely woman in our ward who is an amazing artist. Each December she has a get-together at her home where she teaches you to sculpt things from polymer clay. People do nativity scenes and ornaments and all kinds of things. So each year I make a special ornament for each of my children. Some are holiday-themed (angels and snowmen) and some are specific to each child (Dash is totally into zombies this year so he got a zombie elf). Violet has even started making some of her own (the red-gowned lady and the snowman with broomstick arms are hers).







So this is our tree. It is small and kind of sparsly-branched, but it will never crush any climby babies who try to scale its modest heights. It will never stand as a model of amazing decoration and design, but so far no one has been able to harm themselves with any of the ornaments. The kids are proud of their creations and baby Smitty loves to re-decorate his lower half of the tree every day.