Something New...Real or Toy

First of all the title...Real or Toy is a game that is played on the John Deere videos that Ethan and Joshua both love. They go through and show pictures of tractors and your supposed to guess whether it is a real tractor or one of their toy tractors...it's actually quite tricky. Their toy tractors are exact replicas...just smaller.

As for the "Something New" part, well...

From the time we were married, Mike convinced me, (it wasn't too hard) to have a real Christmas Tree since he'd always had one growing up. As for my family, we tried the real one, once...and only once. It was far too much work for three teenage girls to keep up with...all that watering, and cleaning up of the pine needles...whew! :) But as an adult, I thought it would be a nice tradition to start for our own family. So, for the past 6 years we did. Every weekend following Thanksgiving we'd go and pick out our tree. Sometimes we went with Mike's family up to the Lakes Region, to have one cut down. Other times, we'd just go to one of the many "tree stores" close by and pick one out instead.

Well, for a couple of reasons, we now have an artificial tree. As I've posted in the past, Joshua as well as myself, have asthma. It never occurred to me that the "fresh" tree may add to any breathing difficulties until I came upon an article regarding mold spores, asthma and your tree. Come to find out, having the tree could trigger and asthmatic episode! Well, we have been nebulizer free for over 3 weeks...and don't want to go back. So, if that means no real tree...

Mike and I talked about it and started looking into the purchase of an artificial tree. Oh my goodness!! They aren't cheap, AND most of the best looking ones come prelit. We have our own lights, and are a little, itty, bitty bit short on funds. So, we decided not to do a tree this year, and look at just buying one after Christmas to take advantage of the huge discounts. Besides the homily at our church on the first Sunday of Advent talked about how we shouldn't over decorate prior to the celebration of Christs birth, but that we should save it, and show all that splendor for the twelve days following Christmas up to the Epiphany. Hun. Never thought of it that way.

Well, my Aunt Dianne who lives in Maine had heard from my mom that we weren't going to do a tree this year, and dug out her artificial one to give to us. She has been doing a real tree now for several years, but just didn't have the heart to throw out this gorgeous tree. Well, thank God she didn't, because we are now the gracious owners of this beautiful tree. We can't thank her enough as it is exactly what we wanted and more.

The picture shows that it is simply decorated in lights with an angel at the top, and one angel for each of us on the tree. On either Christmas Eve or morning, we haven't decided yet, we will decorate this magnificent tree in celebration of Christs birth. Now that it's artificial we can leave it up until Epiphany without fear of it being too dry or brittle. And so begins a new tradition in the Ouellette family. We look forward to many years with our new addition and hope that, much like last night when we put it up, our children will continue to sit quietly in amazement at it's beauty as a reminder of the splendor of the Christmas season.