Ornamentation

My first Christmas at the Tedesco house, I was thrilled to see that Jason had a medallion ornament with his fourth grade (I think?) picture on his parent's tree that almost matched the one from my parent's tree. I don't think I had seen any pictures of him from when he was school-aged before I saw that ornament. Wouldn't it be great to have a tree dedicated to just photo ornaments from years past? I am going to try to make some photo ornaments each year for the next few years so that I will have a nice supply for a picture tree. We always just had one Christmas tree growing up, but my mom blew my mind this year by getting not one, not two, but three! trees. Since seeing how festive each tree looks in her house, I've been pondering the idea of getting more than one tree in a few years. (Not this year because we have a busy boy crawling all over the house and our one tree will be placed in our front den with the pocket door safely closed during the day.)  Unpacking ornaments to decorate the tree has always been one of my favorite Christmas traditions. Ornaments that my mom made when we were kids, ornaments that we made when we were kids (Chris made an amazing cyclops gingerbread man when he was five.), ornaments from vacations, our yearly ornaments from my Grandma Dee, they all bring back special memories. One of my favorite types of ornaments are photo ornaments.  I can't think of the last time I looked at a photo album, but I know that every year at Christmas, I cherish seeing my favorite people in our photo ornaments. Pinterest had lots of great ideas for DIY photo ornaments, but I found this site had the best ideas for capturing memories each year. I've already ordered some snowflakes and can't wait to get started making memories.

Also, a few years ago, I got the idea to take all of our photo booth pictures from the last few weddings we had attended and use them in some beautiful snowflake ornaments I bought at Kohl's to give as stocking stuffers to my mom and Jason's mom. The great thing about photo booth pictures are that we are always dressed up for them, the black and white is pretty flattering, and the little pictures are the perfect size for ornaments. Below are two that I gifted my mom and dad for their trees.  We have the one of me biting Jason's leg on our tree because that's a memory I definitely want to relive every year.