Spencer Amber Logan Addy Sadie Miles: Putting up the tree & a visit from Frosty

Christmas 2009 we purchased a artificial tree from COSTCO here in Korea. It had no lights on it, and since we knew we'd be using it for a few years, we decided to but a ton of lights on it... I'm talking GRISWOLD proportions. click here for pictures. Unfortunately, the "made in china" lights had a cheap program box and every time we flipped the switch, each string of lights would flash randomly until we manually synced each string. This took about 5 minutes every time we turned on the tree. On top of that, an additional side-effect of the cheap nature of these lights was that we would loose one or two colors for an entire string 25% - 50% of a string of 480 lights. Each year I would replace 1 or 2 strings and it became very tiresome. So this year we decided to swap them all out for less-cheap "made in china" lights. The first difference is that instead of 480 lights per string, there are only 200. There is no blink capability so one switch turns the whole tree on minus the seizure inducing random flashes. Initially I thought I bought enough to do the tree but came up about 4 strings short and when I went to buy more... they were sold out so I had to buy a larger quantity of shorter strings to make up for the difference and maintain continuity. Nothing in this world is easy... especially for a Cottrell man attempting manual labor :)

Decorating this LEGO tree was so much easier than the real deal...

On the morning of December 1st, our 'Elf on the shelf' magically appeared atop our tree hinting that today was the day to decorate.

This year we have a few new ornaments. We picked up these cool snowmen, star and bell at the PX. They are 'made in Poland' and match my new hot cocoa tankard perfectly.

I think we might need a bigger table next year.

Last year we finally got a hold of a Mary Poppins ornament. We found one a few years back and gave it to my mom (since she is practically perfect in every way), but when we tried to get another one for ourselves, they were sold out. Thank goodness for AMAZON.

Aunt Kristen hooked us up with this cool Mickey phone ornament. When I was a kid we had this phone in our family room. This ornament brings back a lot of memories.

This one we picked up in New Mexico in 2010 but I don't think we had it up on the tree last year. It is made by an American Indian artist.

My mom gave this one to Amber last year. We were commenting how this kind of reminds us of Korea, we eat a lot of grapes here!

The Elf on the shelf watched us get started.

Up until now, we did not have a star on top of our tree. We never found one we liked, so we would just put Tinkerbell up there. This year we found a star.

Addy was so excited to put up the princess ornament.

Logan found Optimus in a hurry.

Amber is stoked about our Mary Poppins.

Sadie had a blast checking out all of our fun decorations.

And here it is. Not bad... not bad.

A fun tradition at our house is that Rudolph stops by on December 1 (click here for some older pics) and gives the kids Christmas pajamas. This year, Rudolph couldn't make it so he sent a friend instead... The kids came into the room and noticed a puddle of water on the floor... Who could have brought PJs this year???