An Almost Finished Tree

Well here we are, less than a week away from Christmas, just digging out from the latest storm that's apparently lumbering northeast now, with much of the country expected to get blasted in the next few days. Around our part of the state, this system was much hyped for several days as a significant ice-sleet-rain-snow event, but when it finally arrived last night, pelting us with sleet and ice pellets, then eventually snow, it was somehow disappointing .... There was a lot of sizzle about this system before it arrived and in comparison with winter storms we've had in the last couple of years, it was more of a fizzle. Not that we weren't affected (we did have about 2 inches of sleet, snow and ice pellets to clean up), but we were expecting much worse. It's just Iowa winter weather, and we don't even mark the solstice officially until Sunday ... a harbinger of a long, deary winter I feel.

Fernymoss more or less completed the tree on Tuesday (12/16), as I labored away late (yet again) upstairs ... these past few weeks have been beyond daunting with all the work demands I've had lately, thus my inactivity around these parts. Anyway, here's the tree as it currently stands (we still have to get the tree skirt taken care of), and in this flash shot you can get an overall impression of what the whole tree looks like at this point.
Here's the corresponding ambient light view --less focused, yes-- but much more colorful, giving an approximate impression of what it really looks like in typical evening lighting in the living room. As you can see, it's heavy on the blue, but that's just the luck of the draw with how the lights ended up on the tree, and that's fine by us! By the end of this weekend we'll have gotten the skirt issue resolved and there will be some gifts appearing there in the next few days....
And here we are at the rather gift barren base of the tree with Santa and Mushy and Pipey just waiting to hand out those gifts that haven't quite arrived yet. All three of these pieces were "inherited" in rather odd and indirect ways (though my sister sent Mushy and Pipey our way a few years ago when she was clearing out a bunch of *stuff*), but they're valued members of our holiday entourage around the tree. Of course we'll have updated photos the closer we get to Christmas (huh? less than a week?!), and in the interim I'll focus on the more individual and diverse ornaments we have on the tree. When we were talking earlier tonight about the ornaments we wanted to highlight, we realized tonight that they do fall into rough thematic categories, so I plan on several posts showing off the sorts of things that appear on our tree ... so stay tuned, as they say.