continuing christmas

Christmas is over and the New Year is approaching, but for our family, we continue to have more celebrations of Christmas with our family.  It's always tradition that we have our family Christmas with my sisters on Christmas day, but you never know when the other celebrations will be.  We won't celebrate with Jerad's extended family until the second.  With that in mind, I'm keeping up my Christmas tree.  I've always had a hard time with Christmas being over.  It's always approached with such anticipation, but then the day comes and goes so quickly.  I hate to just immediately take down the tree.  Okay, I'll admit that I'm not the best housekeeper and part of taking down the tree has to do with procrastination and taking it down is such a chore, but I love having it up, especially since we still have another Christmas to celebrate.

On Saturday, we drove out to Walmart to check out the after Christmas sales.  They normally have everything at half price the next day, and we really wanted to get a pre-lit tree.  The tree that we have, we purchased half price on an after Christmas sale and have had it for most of our marriage.  The problem is, it takes a couple of hours to get it set up, putting each individual branch on and then wrapping the lights evenly.  We bought a new tree and tested it out as soon as we got home.  Jerad was able to set it up and plug in the lights within ten minutes.  I think we'll be setting up our tree a little earlier next year!  We also bought a tree for each of the boys to hang their ornaments.  I also bought several ornaments at half price.  I might have gone a little overboard, but I wanted to make some of those really cool ornament wreaths like this.  I made four of them so far, and I love them.  So, the question is, what am I going to do with this many ornament wreaths?  I'm really not sure.  Like I said, I went a little overboard.  Maybe I'll give them as gifts next year.  I think that this one is my favorite (although the picture isn't very good against my ugly shag carpet).