Christmas Tree Reveal!

It is time! I have finally gotten pictures taken and up of my Christmas Tree. I absolutely LOVE my tree but I have to give a disclaimer.... Nothing looks as good in the pictures as it does in person. I have one word that describes my Christmas.... GLITTER!! Everything has glitter on it so it makes it hard for it to take great pictures. With that said, you can still see why I love my tree.

I have chosen a bit of non traditional colors with my orange and chocolate choices, but I still definitely have the traditional green, red and gold in there.

I love the skirt! It is just a big thing of sheer fabric bunched up and wrapped around.

So I have to tell you my funny story with this tree.... James and I had been married probably 4 or 5 years before we got a tree. James decided that the year we bought our first house, he would surprise me with a Christmas tree. He ordered it online, and when it came it had multicolored lights on it instead of white lights!

I spent an ENTIRE day undoing all of the little plastic things that hold pre-lit lights on and re-stranding white lights. It totally stunk but I was just grateful that he surprised me with a tree :)

This tree will end up as our "Charlie Brown Tree" (that is what I call trees that have homemade ornaments or your kids ornaments on it... I don't mean it in a rude way), and will get a fuller tree for "my" Christmas Tree.

Something that I think people don't think about much when decorating their tree is the topper. This is something that is huge to me and it can totally take your tree to that next level.

Now my topper may be to much for some people, but I love how full and colorful it is and it makes me smile just looking at it.

I also do a really cool topper for my mom's tree that I use a HUGE ribbon/fabric piece and great a fun topper with some stuff kind of like mine in it also.

So here are some steps that I take to do my tree.

I ALWAYS start the decorating process with the ribbons, beads, etc.

This year I found this gold snowflake ribbon in my ribbon drawer and decided to pull it out and try it on my tree. I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier, but I absolutely love it on there.

I also use this tulle type gauzey fabric. I bought this just like this, but I thought if you wanted something like this for your tree, you could go to Walmart and buy some tulle for $.97 a yard in whatever color, cut it into strips and spray paint a little bit of gold on it to give it a shimmer. SO CHEAP and easy.

Here it is with just the ribbons on it. I have 4 different strand items on here, you don't have to use that many, I just like the variety.

The next step would be to take your larger ornaments and start with them towards the bottom and work your way up. The larger the ornament, the closer to the bottom it should be. That helps with the weight/balance of the tree.

Remember the Dollar Store ornaments I purchased?

Well this green snowflake is one of them as well as the stick thingy coming out right next to it. I told you that you wouldn't even notice my Dollar Store finds next to my more expensive ones!

Do you just find ornaments in the store as they are and just put those on the trees? Why not try putting things a little bit out of the ordinary!

Here I picked up some of these cool stick thingys! They are WAY awesome looking and they are so fun.

On the left of the picture, you can see it in the tree. When I use sticks like this in the tree, I stick them in UPWARDS and not downwards. I want them to fall with the tree, not against the tree. If it is a topper, then I will put them in more downward obviously.

This fun drapey stick.....

was the base of my topper and adds so much movement and sparkle to the tree.

I have so many fun ornaments on here but of course I can't sit and go over all of them.... that wouldn't be very interesting anyway.

If you notice carefully, the bottom third of my tree doesn't really have ornaments on it. My 14 month old daughter isn't making it very easy to get the Christmas stuff out this year.... BUT, I will show you in my next Christmas post what I did with the ornaments that were supposed to be on the bottom. They didn't go to waste and I love what I was able to create with them.