Down with the Christmas trees

We finally made the time to take down the Christmas tree in the living room. It left a trail of needles out the door, so it was time. I always think it will be so much work, but this time I had lots of help. In one hour the kids and I had all the ornaments, lights and berries off the tree and Jim brought it out the door. I guess the real work is putting away the ornaments and cleaning up, that took me the rest of the day to finish.

I never took a nice picture of the tree finished, but here are some pictures of putting it up.

Downstairs we put up our artificial tree and decorated it with our Promise Tree ornaments. This is based off the Jesse tree idea combined with the advent calendar. Our advent activity turned into a full tree complete with an ornament for each of the kids on each day of December. Thanks to my Mom for making all the ornaments for the kids. Each ornament represents a portion of the Old Testament up to the fulfillment of God's Promise to send a Saviour in the birth of His Son.

The kids really enjoyed this activity and learned a lot of Old Testament stories. Jim and I even benefited from teaching the kids in a chronological order of all the stories we already knew. If you ask them the boys could identify the story that corresponds to each ornament.