Since we’re away for the week of Thanksgiving, most of December, and the first week of January, our tradition has been to either take our our Christmas tree and decorate it the weekend we have our early Thanksgiving meal or the first weekend of November to maximize our ROI on it and get use out of it. I’ve collected an extensive collection of Christmas tree ornaments in my life, and it’s the one time of the year when I can pull them all out and get really excited about them.

We took the tree out and decorated it today, and after finishing putting all the ornaments on, I looked at it and thought, wow, what a beauty. Chris said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I’m not quite sure how you could look at this tree and *not* think it was a beauty given how cultured, worldly, and diverse all of the ornaments are that are hanging from it. It’s got ornaments from places ranging from Seattle to New York, Prince Edward Island to Japan to Australia and China. It has Austrian glass blown round balls, Tibetan hand-stitched reindeer, and hand-painted wooden trains and Christmas markets from Germany. It even has ornaments on it that I’ve made with oddball seashells I’ve collected over the years, as well as ornaments my friends have made me dating back to my high school years. This tree is representative of everything I love about the world and life. It makes me really proud and happy every time I look at it.