Festival of Trees

Festival of Trees is basically where people decorate trees, wreaths, gingerbread houses, and make other random decor and trinkets and they are auction and sold off.  

ALL proceeds from the auctions and selling go to Primary Children's Hospital.

That hospital is super close to our hearts.

They saved my little boy (along with a lot of other people before we got there).

Here is our tree decorating adventure!

Yep, I know it's blurry ... but look how fee trees there are (soon there will be approximately 700 trees!!). 

Dale putting the "hard ware" on the tree.  

Basically the  tree has to be totally stuck together in every way.

*PVC pipe up the center

* Re-bar on the trunk all the way up past the last connection

*All tree branches must be permenatly attached by manufacture (so like our family tree we put all the branches in, we wouldn't be able to have that type of tree at the Festival of Trees).

* Must use special screws to attach the sections

*The tree stand also had to be bought through Festival of Trees.

*ALL ornaments have to be hot glued if they can come part in any way.

*ALL ornaments have to be wired with floral type wire onto the tree.

Snowflakes my grandma tatted for our tree. 

Coming along.  Still not done though.

(Notice under the tree is a giant bag.  When the Festival of Trees is done, they have to deliver the trees to the person who bought them.  They have these big bags under the tree skirts and they just wrap the tree up in, and put all the stuff that is around the tree in boxes left by the decorators.) 

With the tree skirt that my Mother-In-Law made. 

Empty box gifts under the tree. 

The giant Snoopy tree/display complete with a dog house that was between 5-6 FEET tall.  It was awesome.  The starting bid was $6,000!!   

One way we could do it ... we played around with the SIXTY-SIX books a lot

(Holy cow friends and family!  Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!) 

Almost perfect ... 

That's the same picture ...  

Still not quite right ... 

Almost ... 

THERE!  See that cute smiling face!  Yep.  Perfect. 

We checked our tree first thing on auction night.

WOW!  We were super surprised to see  this starting price for our tree. 

Santa made an appearance ... 

Our tree didn't sell on auction night. 

That was okay.  It just meant it would go for the above base price.

The next day we took the kids.

We HAD to do this picture right?? 

And GUESS WHAT?!?  The price tag was off our tree.  Which meant that someone bought our tree the next morning!  Hooray!

We took the kids to see Santa ...  

 Santa said he could hold the baby too.  

The kids LOVED seeing the trees.  It was so much fun to see how excited they were for all of them.

Over all it was such a great experience and we're so glad we took on decorating a tree.  It was so fun!

Until next year ....