Retro-fying Our First Christmas Tree

Do you want to know what one of the first things I got excited about after Mr. Converse Sneakers proposed to me was?  Our first Christmas tree.  I love Christmas time and I love traditions even more, so the thought of celebrating our first Christmas by putting up our first Christmas tree made me giddy.  I almost wish I was kidding.

Mr. CS doesn’t get quite  as enthused about most things like I do, especially Christmas trees, but he sat next to me patiently as I showed him tree after tree anyway because he’s a wonderful husband who wants me to be happy.  I showed him some of the photos of trees and ornaments I posted my love for last week, like these two:





He seemed to like the blue and really love the Shiny Brite ornaments (without all the pink, however).  This served as our inspiration for our own tree.  A retro-fied Christmas tree.  Here’s how it turned out:



We mostly stuck to silver and blue but mixed in some other colors with our cookie cutter ornaments and some reproduction Shiny Brite ornaments we got from TJ Maxx for $12.00/pack.  The blue and silver ornaments mostly came from Target, but some came from Craigslist and garage sales (so all for very cheap).  Our tree topper also came from Target, our garland from a garage sale, our lights from Target, and our tree skirt was DIY-ed by me (more on that next week).

Here’s a close up – you can see the different blue ornaments, the cookie cutter ornaments, the Shiny Brites, and the silver ornaments.



Let’s get a better look at that Shiny Brite ornament in the lower right corner – it’s my favorite:



Ahhhh – gorgeousness!  Mixed in with our purchased ornaments we have some more sentimental ones.  We try to buy an ornament whenever we go on vacation or do something out of the ordinary (we sometimes forget or aren’t able to buy one when they aren’t selling them).  Here’s on from when we went to the MN Renaissance Festival in 2009.  We have a couple from our honeymoon and one from a trip to Galena, IL a couple years ago. 



We also started a tradition of buying a new monumental ornament every year the reflects our year in some way.  Instead of buying a bride and groom ornament since we would have to go to a specialty store for that and we thought I was a little cheesy, we bought a silver “S” to symbolize our new shared last name.




For fun, we made a video of us decorating the tree.  I’m obviously much more knowledgeable about photography than I am about videos!  Sorry about the weird orientation of the video; I completely forgot about screen ratios and whatnot so I thought we could tilt the camera vertically and it would work out fine.  I promise our next videos will fill up the whole screen!

We absolutely love looking at our first tree!  I had to take a fun bokeh photo to show that it’s our first.




So that’s our first tree!  I may have gone a little ornament-crazy but we had way more where that came from.  All the colors and bright white lights make me so happy!

What does your tree look like?  Do you do anything different from year to year?

Linking up to: Honey We're Home, My 3 Boybarians, 2805, Common Ground, Hooked on Houses, Keeping the Christmas Spirit Alive, 365, Michaela Noelle Designs, Nesting Place