Weddingbee Blog

Mr. Starfish and I both come from families with our own holiday traditions. For the past six years, we’ve enjoyed sharing these with each other, but we never actually started our own. Now that we are officially a family, we decided it is time to create some Starfish family traditions.

Our newest idea came from Bridesmaid M.

She recently told me a story from college I had never heard before. Bridesmaid M is also my cousin, and the girl I’ve gone to school with since 4th grade through college. While we were out shopping during Black Friday, she told me, my aunt, and cousins about a conversation she had in college. Her roommate was talking about going with her family to “cut down the tree,” and she was totally confused. She asked, “You cut down your own tree?” with confused look on her face. Her roommate replied, “Yes, where else do you get your tree?” My cousin replied that she got her trees from a parking lot.

Yes, my family has always purchased their trees from parking lots. This is totally normal, and along with my cousin, I didn’t know people actually cut down their own trees. I thought this was something that only happened in movies like Christmas Vacation.

To celebrate our first year as a married couple, Mr. Starfish and I cut down our own tree! We were super excited about getting our first tree and especially for cutting it down. We’ve been dating for about seven years, lived together for five, but we never had our own tree. This year we wanted to make an event out of it.

We went with BIL and Sister Starfish, as well as their neighbors.

We went on a hunt to find our trees. It took much longer than we expected. We looked for the perfect trees for over 2 hours. We searched high and low for the perfect three trees.

Most trees were short or fat, or short and fat, like this:

By the time we found ours, we were excited. Mr. Starfish let me cut ours down. BIL Starfish made the experience super easy by bringing his Sawzall.

It was a success! Even though the tree was shorter than we hoped for and it took over 2 hours to find, we had a blast and decided along with the other couples, this would be a yearly tradition.

Seeing as we never had a tree before, we only have a handful of ornaments—not enough to decorate a beautiful tree.

While on my crafting kick, I was looking at the photos we were using on our holiday cards. Then, an idea hit me. I could make a wedding photo garland! I knew it would be time consuming, but I was really excited to include our wedding photos in our holiday decor.

So I purchased red and white cardstock and bakers’ twine. I then resized and printed off a ton of pictures of our families from the wedding. Then, I used some craft punches from the wedding to cut out scalloped circles for the “ornaments” and attached the punched out photos, and finally, I strung them together with the bakers’ twine to create a garland.

We then needed a tree toper. I wanted to be traditional and get a star, but couldn’t find any we liked. So we tied two Starfish left over from the wedding with the bakers’ twine to create our “star.” Pretty perfect for a family called the Starfishes.

So, Mr. Starfish and I now have a new tradition. Every year we’ll go to the local tree farm to cut down our tree. No more parking lots for this Starfish! I guess that’s what happens when you move from the city to the ’burbs.

Do you have any plans for new traditions? And I have to ask, where do you get your tree? Home Depot, a farm, a parking lot?

You may have noticed by our “ornaments” that we have our photos! There will be more of these coming to a post near you!