Our 2024 Christmas Tree

Our 2024 Christmas tree is up, decorated, and even sporting new LED Christmas lights this year.

Ooh, la, la. Fancy, I know.

In a world full of discord, there is one thing we all have in common. Politicians have campaigned on less. This great unifier is the absolute frustration we’ve all felt over burned-out Christmas lights.

You know it’s true! It happens to all of us.

You carefully pack away in the attic a working strand of lights, or worse, a working pre-lit Christmas tree and when you pull it out the next year, half of the lights are out.

What kind of mayhem happens in the attic when no one is watching?

Is it like the Christmas decor version of Toy Story where the decor parties when the humans aren’t around?

Is it a conspiracy by Big Christmas Light to get us to purchase more lights?

Is it a spot of bad luck?

Whatever it is, when that happened to us this year, we decided to remove all the old lights from our tree.

That takes forever, by the way.

I exaggerate slightly. It took me and my husband two hours to remove the old lights from a 7-ft tree. Those marriage vows of “for better or for worse” come in clutch when the Christmas lights burn out!

If you think removing lights from a pre-lit tree is bad, imagine working in a factory where you have to install the lights on a tree. Yikes.

Suddenly, I don’t feel so ungrateful.

If this is the worst thing I have to complain about, I’m doing okay. More than okay.

I’m loved. I’m safe. I’m fed. My teens even made eye contact with me this morning.

The cherry on top of this life sundae is that I’m also surrounded by Christmas decor that I made. How fun is that?

This year, my Christmas tree has dozens of embroidered flower ornaments and macrame ornaments. I’ll show you them more in-depth in another blog post, but I’ve been working on them, off and on, all year.

People seemed baffled that I was embroidering so many flowers when I’d share them on social media. While I did have a plan to use them as ornaments, creating is its own reward.

Kurt Vonnegut once said, “Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow… The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward.”

Creating, in all its various forms, definitely gives me a kick, a boost, and many feel-good moments.

I hope this holiday season is full of feel-good moments for you.

There can be a lot of pressure and so many expectations surrounding the holidays, but I hope you have time to stop, breathe, and soak in the moments, big and small, of holiday magic.

How are your Christmas lights holding up this year? Did you come out unscathed? Let me know! You can always leave a comment on this blog post, email me here, or reach out via Instagram or Facebook.

Happy Christmas!

P.S. There are painted wood Christmas trees on my tree. They come in a 30-pack and are unfinished, so you can decorate them however you want.

The macrame ornaments were made with these wood rings and I’ll be using this spool of macrame cord for years. That’s no hardship because the color is so pretty.

These are the LED lights we ordered. We used two packs. The cord on these is REALLY long, so we didn’t even need to use an extension cord to plug them in. I can’t be the only one that’s had problems with proximity to an outlet.

Thanks for hanging out with me today. If you spotted something intriguing in one of these photos, I might already have a blog post about it. I’ll link a few here.

DIY Copper Christmas Trees

Leather Christmas Trees

Wood Nameplates on Christmas Stockings

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