Friday, December 17, 2010

Ornaments on the Tree - World Travels

So today is my first day of Christmas vacation (I'm off for the rest of the year), and I find that I was wide awake at 6:30 am when I rolled over to tell my husband it's time to get up! I don't think I'm ever wide awake at that time - even when I've been up for 45 minutes getting ready to go to work by then!

Nevertheless, we came downstairs to eat breakfast and it was then that I realized it had been a couple days since I'd watered the tree. Really? How can such a large decoration in our house go unnoticed (or rather, uncared for)? Hopefully it will survive despite my lack of attention to it! Maybe more blog "face" time will make it feel better :) .

Today's ornaments will feature some of the cool places I and my family have been able to go over the years. Since the girls in the family love ornaments, we're always looking for them, whether it's December,  February or July!


Most of you that know me probably know that our family has been going to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina every other year, for a long time. I think our first trip as a family was in 1995, but my parents have been going even longer than that. When we were kids, Lauren and I would go on the beach and find real sand dollars. One year, we found tons of them, and decided that we would just let them dry out on our condo porch, and they would turn out beautifully white like this one :) . Well, you can probably guess what happened, but several days later we had a lot of smelly sand dollars on our porch, and they weren't that pretty! So now we have a much better looking (and smelling) reminder of the fun on our tree.

This one might just look like a pretty snowflake to some, but if you got up close (and especially if you could feel it), you'd see that it was made completely of salt. Not just any salt either, mind you, but salt from the Great Salt Lake out in Salt Lake City, Utah. Now, I have never been to Utah, but my parents have been at least a couple times. This was actually not for my Dad's business travels, but for my Mom's! (I'm sure you can imagine that doesn't happen often!) Mom used to sell Stampin' Up! rubber stamps, and their annual convention was out there a couple years because that's where they are headquartered. So Mom actually took Dad on a business trip with her and they brought us girls back some souveniers.


This little wooden dutch shoe actually isn't symbolic of my heritage, but of a trip we took out to Holland, Michigan to see some family friends. This town is usually bursting with people coming to see all the tulips in the spring, but when we went it was during the off season and everything was cold (and dead lol). But that didn't stop us from visiting all the cute little Dutch shops! This ornament also has my name carved/burned into the other side of the shoe. 


These next three are all from the same basic area, but each tells a little different story :) .  Only a week or so after Robbie and I got engaged, my family decided to take a short getaway to Arizona - one last trip as a family before I got married. So we headed out to Arizona expecting the weather to be cool, but definitely warmer than Pittsburgh. We were in for some surprises! It was pretty cold, and in some places that we went (i.e. the Grand Canyon), there were several inches of snow! It was really cool to see, but a lot colder than expected!

Anyways, the cool cow ornament comes from a little town called Jerome, which had some great history behind it (that right now I just can't remember!). It also had a lot of little shops that were mostly small businesses selling things that were homemade and such. The cow ornament actually came from a store that basically sold everything cow you could think of!


This trip to Arizona certainly was amazing - I saw another part of the country that I had never seen before - all very beautiful, in many different ways. Hopefully I'll get to take Robbie there someday - perhaps when it isn't snowing!

Happy Friday to Everyone - 1 week until Christmas! :)

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