Oh Mitchmas Tree. . .

My favorite thing about Mitchmas isn't the cookies or the music or the presents or even Elf. Okay, well my actual favorite thing about Mitchmas is that I get two weeks off of school. But my second favorite thing is the tree. I LOVE CHRISTMAS TREES.

Love love love love love.

I love the lights and the ornaments and the lights and the smell and the lights. I love my tree skirt. I love the lights. (In college we had so many Christmas lights in our hallways that the fire marshall came; the next year we proclaimed that you could see our suite from space because of all of the Christmas lights.)

If I had my druthers, I'd have a Christmas tree all year. But I don't think Matt would go for it.

Here's this year's tree.

I'm really anal when I decorate the tree, too. This comes from my mother, who was anal about the tree because her mother was anal about the tree. Oh, family tradition!

When I was a kid, we would decorate the tree as a family, and Jordan and I would hang our favorite ornaments.

***(This decorating only came after an always-grueling hunt for the perfect tree, and the subsequent fight my parents would have about whether or not the tree was standing straight. Our trees weren't always glamorous--especially the year my dad went and chopped down two trees and tied them together to form one--but they were always nicely decorated.)***

Anyway, we would have wonderful family moments decorating the tree, selecting the perfect spot for each ornament, and then, when Jordan and I returned from school the following day, the tree would be completely different. My mom would spend the entire next day rearranging the ornaments to make the tree perfect. She has passed on this neurosis to me.

The key is that the ornaments MUST HANG. No resting on branches. That's just sloppy.

Here are some of my favorite ornaments. This glass glitter penguin was a gift from Tanya, and it's always one of the first ones I put on. It illuminates with the lights. Ahhhhhhhhh. . .
There are some handmade ornaments, like this one I made when I was six. (There's part of a very old toilet paper roll in there!)
Or this one that Chloe made a few years back.
And then there are a bunch of ornaments that just look like they are handmade, but are really from Target or World Market.



We've got old ornaments. This one's from my grandmother. This is my "Baby's First Christmas" ornament. It used to have wheels, but when I was a kid I would steal it off the tree and play with it. The wheels didn't survive.
These bells are from my parents first Christmas together.

And this one is from the first Christmas Matt and I were married.
This is one I kept from a first-grade fundraiser. My mom hated this ornament and would always put it in the back of the tree. We would battle throughout the month because I insisted that it needed to be front and center. In reality, it's pretty ugly. But that ornament and I have history.
And then I have some awesome random ornaments. Like this one from Caitie. (I used to eat bowls of chickpeas with ranch in the dining hall freshman year.)
And this one from Tanya. It'd be a blue Mitchmas without this baby.
And this one from Collin. It's paying homage to my country roots.
Or this one from Matt's first year at JMU.
Or this one, his little Buffalo Bills man.
What you might notice about the tree is that a certain jolly fat man is nowhere to be found. I'm just not a fan. My parents never told me that Santa was real because my mom believed that, since you could rearrange the letters of his name to spell SATAN, Santa must be evil. (She put the "fun" in fundamentalist Christian parents. . .) But it was okay; I just told everyone in my first grade class that Santa was a fake.