Festival of Trees

Hello there! It's been a while. :) I have so much to catch you up on!

First and most important, the Festival of Trees...

This year marks the 10 year anniversary of Steven's grandma Julie's passing. All of his cousins wanted to do something special for her. What's cooler than a tree in the Festival of Trees? If you haven't ever done one before, let me tell you.. It's a lot of work!! But so worth it.

We started working on this last year, the day after Christmas in fact. We went to all the stores and got all the ornaments and the tree on sale. All through the year we worked on it. We went to all the work shops and decorated our little hearts away.

We kept the whole thing a secret from the rest of the family, which was the hardest part! On the last day of the Festival of Trees, we set up a scavenger hunt for the family that led them to the Festival. They were so surprised! Here is what our tree looked like...

It sold! It sold it sold it sold!!! We were very excited about this. :)

Our theme was nerds. We wanted to add our specail touches to the mix of the Christmas ornaments. We made felt ornaments that had to do with nerd type of things.. computers, floppy disks, etc. We also added nerd glasses to the tree that we spray painted to match.

This was one of my favorite parts of the tree. We had gone to the D.I. and picked up some keyboards. We ripped them all apart and made them into Christmas sayings.

This is Julie. She died 2 years before I met Steven. I am sad that I never got to meet her but I love her family so much, so I know that I would have loved her too!

All right, credit to our boys! They helped SO much. They drilled the tree together and got all of those requirments taken care of. They also made this awesome snowman and the tree topper. They made the snowman out of chicken wire, which they would like to say is not great material to work with! But look how cute he turned out! And the star is incredible. We had old mother board from a computer that they drilled the star out of and then added lights to. What would we do without our guys?

Under the tree we had presents wrapped. All of the boxes had blankets in them. Usually when companies buy the trees, they donate the presents back to Primary Children's Hospital. That's what we were hoping that they did. I had put some of my blankets on my blog already in this post and this post.

We had so much fun doing this! We decided that we are going to do this every 10 years. In 2022, it will be the 20 year anniversary of Julie's passing and the 10 year anniversary of my grandma Beth's passing. Steven and I thought it would be so much fun to be able to do this tradition with our children. If you haven't ever done a big project like this, I totally recommend it.

 Like I said before, it takes a lot of time, but it is so worth it.