This tree is new for me this year. Our daughter moved out this summer to start med school. Both of my kids have huge themed ornament collections. Hers are animals. We’ve always had a big tree in the family room for their ornaments. With her ornaments gone, it seemed the tree would be too big for my son’s collection (his tree is coming soon!). So we instead bought two small skinny trees. I love having the pairing of two trees and they have really made the room feel less crowded than the big tree did. Our son’s ornaments fit on the bigger of the two trees, which left me with the little one, which is about 4 feet tall.

I have unintentionally been creating a collection of snowflake ornaments over the years and I moved those from my tree in the living room to the little tree. A few of the snowflakes were crocheted by my grandmother, so those are precious to me. My friend Claudine made me several gorgeous beaded snowflakes last year and add in the ones I had randomly bought over the years and I had a collection. Then I stuck some snowballs in the branches. I got these snowballs for Christmas last year and I didn’t really know what I was going to do with them. More snowballs are in the containers below (which were my great-grandfather’s and were used to take produce to the market to sell – he was a farmer). The dogs and I are having an ongoing discussion about these snowballs. Merlin, who loves nothing more than a good ball, has pointed out to me that they are balls. Really nice soft balls. And he has removed them from the tree and scattered them around the floor to prove his point a few times. Percy has chimed in by simply grabbing one from the tree in front of me so I would understand my errors in reasoning. Despite the dispute with the dogs, I love the way this snowflake tree came together!