Our NON-TRADITIONAL Tree.

You know how I feel about traditions. I LOVE them! You know how I feel about this time of year-I LOVE it!. The girls love this time of year too and bless their hearts, they have not had an easy time with our house being on the market. To be honest, I am not loving it either. I know this is temporary and once we get in the new house it will all be worth it, but man this is no fun. Not even a little bit.

Since our house is on the market and we have been told that "personal" things should not be displayed in the house, we have not decorated at all. No Halloween or Fall decorating and no Christmas decorating.  It is tough for the girls, especially Ashton. I am not a fan either, but will do whatever is necessary to help our house sell faster in this slow time of year for selling houses.

We finally decided that we would put up our tree but we would just leave off the personal decorations. Somehow Daddy forgot we had this conversation or didn't realize it was decided, so when I asked him to get the tree down out of the attic, he looked at me and ever so sweetly said, "Oh. Well, I kind of already ordered the girls a little tree that is real for them to decorate. It will be delivered on Friday". I was bummed, but at the same time I loved that he had done that for the girls.

So Friday afternoon, just after we got home from picking Ashton up from school, the doorbell rang and a box was on the porch addressed to Ashton and Landry Bryce.  They were excited to get a package...one that said, "open immediately--contains live plant".

I texted Daddy to make sure the girls could open it or did he want them to wait for him to be home.  He called and said for them to go ahead and open it, he just wanted to hear. So we put the phone on speaker and they went to town. They squealed with delight and had no idea you could have an itty bitty Christmas tree delivered to your house. That was super cool in Ashton's book!

Ashton read the card out loud and it said: 

Ashton and Landry,

I'm sorry we couldn't have a big Christmas tree this year...next year we'll make it up to you in our new house!!

-I Love You Both...Daddy

The girls literally could not wait to put the teeny little decorations on. So after they got out of the bath and got their jammies on, we let them at it. Since it didn't take long, we were still able to have Movie Night and a Christmas movie was in order so we watched "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer".

{the lighting in the kitchen is horrible-so the pictures turned out weird}

So here is our Non-Traditional Tree for 2010. 

I wish we had our big tree up...but the girls are happy (happy isn't the best word-satisfied is better) with this one and they know this will never ever happen again. Luckily, we are going to be at Mamo's and Papo's house for Christmas this year so that makes up a little bit for not having all our traditional decorations up.  

We will make sure that we DO all of our other traditions as well as hopefully establishing a new one or two that will remind us of the year we didn't have a tree.

Sometimes being a parent in certain situations just isn't fun...and this is one of those situations. But...we will make the best of it!