Please first read my message in the reply to Todd's email about TTC 2016.
The first photo that I call Twins is of two small trees. These sit on top of the cabinet full of silver. Mary calls them "Forest trees" because their trunk is made to look like real wood. The wood star on the top is permanently attached. These were very scrawny and ugly trees. They'd been scrunched into boxes and all the "needles" and "branches" were flat. It took a long time to simply fluff (Mary's word) them out.
Mary bought a couple of mantle covers that are in place along the top of the cabinet on which these trees are sitting. It is really pretty and also lights up. She hung some ornaments along it. I need to get a photo of it before it's taken down. These photos were taken when the trees had simply been put up to get them off the floor and out of the way so the skirts weren't "settled".
I call these trees twins because they are identically decorated - i.e. exactly the same number of ornaments in the same configuration on both. I got to plan what to do with these and decided on the symmetry and four colors that mirrored each other. Then I discovered there are almost no green balls among hundreds of ornaments. So both got the gold with the respective red and blue. After I was done with them, Mary put some of the smallest of the red cardinals on both so they ended up not being quite twins in the end.
There is a permanently attached wood bluebird in one of the trees. If I'd been thinking I would have put the blue balls on that one but I didn't think of it until later. You can see this blue aberration about halfway up the tree (red balls) that's on the left.
The other photo is Mary's snowman tree. Most of the ornaments on here are brand new this year. Only four of the snowmen on here were really ornaments. Some are metal with magnets on the back meant to decorate your appliances. Roger drilled a tiny hole in the top of each of those so I could insert hangers. The majority of the snowmen are name tags made of thin cardboard. I had to punch them out of the a sheet. Fortunately these already had a tiny hole in the top where the hanger would attach.
I looked and looked and looked and looked through box after box after box after box until I found the icicles. Mary and I both knew we had them, but they weren't in any of the places we remembered they should be, nor could we find them in logical places. The high school girl who put things away last year had no system.
The Frosty tree topper is lighted as you can probably see. Mary has lots of wrapped packages she uses under the trees. She'll pick the ones with the paper that matches the tree theme, hence you can see these all have snowmen or are as white as snow.
