Friday, December 5, 2008

Christmas tree dilema

I have grown up with an artificial Christmas tree for my entire life. My mom is also big on the color coordinated, matching Christmas ornaments. My parents tree is gorgeous! I am really a fan of the coordinating ornaments if it's done correctly. This is the type of tree I am used to and like.

Whenever I would go over to friend's houses I thought their real trees looked crappy compared to my family's perfectly beautiful tree (which had an ornament on every limb). Many times my friend's trees had a hodge podge of crazy mismatching ornaments, which kind of drove me nuts. I also think it would be extremely annoying to have to vacuum up all of the pine needles every few days.

Dennen's family had real Christmas trees when he was growing up and he loved it! I guess I can see where he's coming from... How cool to go and pick out a tree with your family. It's kind of like picking out pumpkins for Halloween. If choosing a tree is anything like picking out pumpkins though, my grandpa could tell you how extremely picky I am.

I'm wondering what everyone's opinion is on this topic. What type of tree did you have growing up? Did you have a hodge podge of ornaments? Which I'll have to admit, can be very sentimental.


Or color coordinating, matching ornaments?



This is a very important topic to me, like I'm sure it is to many of you as well. So please shed some light on the subject. What type of tree and ornaments is the best way to go? Or else we might end up with a tree like this...

11 comments:

Kelly said...

Well, Glen and I had that same dilemma. I had fake ones and he had real. I hate how our tree always reminds me of Charly Browns tree. But Glen refuses to let me buy a fake one. So I have to deal with it, because he usually doesn't care about anything I do to the house. I gotta say I've lost this war.

Anonymous said...

I like real trees and think you should go for one. Selling them at SunRiver was cool; it's awesome how different each tree can be. I love cordinated trees too. I hate all the mismatched ornaments. I know it can be sentimental but NO THANKS at least have a themed tree or something. Annette's (mymotherinlaw) tree is crazy it has all those funny family ornaments like josh's school pictures from every year with a tacky frame ohh and all the ones from the other eight kids too. enough said follow your heart and make dennen vacuum the needles up (: -megan

Christine said...

I had a combo of both growing up. I like the real ones but hate the clean up. Andreas' mom on the other hand is just like you. Perfect, all matching tree ornaments. I love seeing her tree at Christmas time. You better get on it though, Christmas is so soon. Merry Christmas by the way. :)

Rissa and Jared said...

we had a real tree until my mom realized she was allergic and then we went to fake. my mom has mismatched ornaments which i didn't like as a teenager but i LOVE it now. I have a fake tree (cheaper and easier to do lights when they are prelit) and coordinated ornaments. I have a collection of ornaments that I'll put on a smaller tree at some point...not this christmas though.

Trey said...

My mom liked to mix it up every year. We generally went real and alternated between natural and flocked (the tree was also a very full fir or spruce). Most of the ornaments had a theme, but in a house of 6 kids we proudly displayed our homemade ones which tended to throw off the theme. Michelle and I totally dig on the sparsely branched charlie brown trees. I am a little picky as far as type goes. I LOVE alpine firs because they grow above 8000 feet causing them to grow slow and smelly-good. We name the tree every year, and decorate him with some pretty wild ornaments. We buy a new ornament every year and write teh date and all that shiz, but out first christmas we bought a bunch of thrift store ornaments. check our blog in the coming days as we post about this year's tree. Shoh'ty. The name will make sense when you see him. I think you should get a real tree and match it all up the way you like it, and maybe throw a random one in there for good measure.

Kari said...

I grew up with a fake tree (then it went to 3 smaller fake trees of different sizes, which was cute too) and my husband is into real trees. We get a real tree to make him happy, but I feel that that will change eventually. :) When it comes to ornaments, my mom always had different ones that we had accumulated over the years. I like that because they were all gifts or show different parts of our lives. I have one for each sport I played, etc. But what is hard about that, is it probably takes a lifetime to accumulate all of those, so you have to start with matching and slowly work to accumulation!

Marissa Jeanette said...

This was a dilemma for me and aaron too. I grew up with a real tree and we would even go and cut down our own tree every year. Aaron's family has been doing a fake tree for the last 10 years so he thinks its more piratical, but i disagree, it just doesn't feel like Christmas with out one. So the way we have settle it is the year that we go to my dads house we put up the fake tree my mom gave us and on the years we stay here we get a real tree, except for this year because we are broke so we had to use the fake tree again:( and as for the ornaments i think that you should have them match but not to matchy matchy other wise it just looks tacky.

Kali said...

Mark doesn't give a crap, but I personally like the look of fake trees the best. Although, I think it's really cool that some people make it a tradition to go get a tree every year after Thanksgiving. That's what my Dad has always done. I just never went with him so I'm not attached to the tradition. If Mark wasn't such a city boy I would go pick out a tree, but also put a fake one up in the nicer room. Make sense? For my decorations, I have matching ones but I also have a bunch of individual ornaments that describe us. Like we both have a snowboarding ornament!

Katie said...

When we were little we did 2, one coordinated and one random. As we got older we transitioned to just the beautiful, design magazine worthy (artificial) tree.

Now, Garrett and I do live trees and we're collecting oranments every year so it'll be a random hodgepoge.

Anonymous said...

I have always loved a live tree. When we were first married that was the only kind we had. Then we moved to WA and visited UT every Christmas. That meant leaving a cut tree in my house unattended and unwatered for a week or two. Man it was a fire waiting to happen by the time we returned and you should have heard the rebellion when I tried to take it down before we left. Finally practicality won out. Cleaner, safer and cheaper- all the things you associate with Christmas. URK!

Anonymous said...

I remember the time I tried to convince Katie that a poinsette with lights on it would substitute for a Christmas tree. She rebelled & would not come to Grandma house again if she had that Ugly plant. One I tried an upside down tree...Mel rebelled. I used to try to make them all different, not I go for easy. Thanks Hilary and Dennen for putting up our tree. Grandma Jane