When my sisters and I were younger, we used to read The Night Tree by Eve Bunting every year around Christmas and decorate our own night tree. The book is about a family that drives just outside of their town's city limits to find the same tree in the woods that they have decorated every year at Christmastime. They decorate it with all sorts of goodies for the birds and animals to eat and leave it as their Christmas gift to the forrest. Since my sisters and I are all grown up, it's been a while since we last decorated a night tree. This year though, since our boys were in town and there is the perfect "night tree" in my parent's front yard (and really, just because we plain old wanted to), we revived the tradition! We all collected pinecones around my parent's property for a few days beforehand, Jenn and I had the *joyous* job of stringing oodles of popcorn, and then on the evening we were going to decorate the tree, we finished up the pinecones by rolling them in peanut butter and birdseed and hanging them on strings for the tree.
My sister Kell keeps her drum set (yep, a drum set. She's that awesome!) in the garage, so while the big boys got their pinecones ready, Tanner rocked out with Auntie Jenn. Much more entertaining than pinecones!
Happy Emmikins hung out with Uncle Nathan inside while we got things ready outside where it was, in traditional Oregon fashion....
...pouring rain!
We bundled up though and decorated anyway!
Drew
Coll getting a boost from Daddy
Tan Tan and Lala
When we had finished hanging all the pinecones, the boys spread the extra birdseed on the ground...
...and set out apples and carrots for the deer and squirrels.
Elsie came out to decorate, all bundled up, for just a tiny bit.
Emmie did too!
We had a bonfire going and of course, when Drew finished up with the tree, it was time to sword fight the flames. Short lived. Very short lived.
I didn't grab any pictures, but the next morning, it had stopped raining and the tree was absolutely filled with happy birds and squirrels. The decorations lasted a few days and since you can see our night tree from my parent's kitchen window, it was fun to watch all the little critters pop in and out of the tree over three or four days after we had decorated.
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