Festival of Trees

So Festival of Trees I believe is only something in Utah, so let me explain for maybe those of you who don't know. Every year they do Festival of Trees, everything is donated from the food right down to the place where they hold it. All of the proceeds go to Primary Children's Medical Center. For the past 2 years, my sweet mother-in-law has been on the board of committee and we've made it a family tradition every year that we all pitch in and help. Stephanie (mother-in-law) runs the Sweet Shoppe, which is full of candy, carmels, and chocolates; you name it and they've got it! People spend all year making trees, wreaths or gingerbread houses with their own money and time and then they have a bidding aution that anyone can come to and buy these trees. Some people buy them for themselves or their company, others buy them and donate it to someone. The trees are usually made with someone it mind as a tribute to them if they have passed on or if they are diagnosed with a disease. So all us adults go up Saturday night (we left Brookie with my parents) and after it closes at 10:00 p.m. we started to clean up the Sweet Shoppe, taking everything down. Each committee person is given anywhere from 4-8 trees that we have to deliver to the families that bought them or to who they were donated too. We had 4 this year. We go and put all the accessories around the trees in boxes and then shrink wrap the trees and get them loaded into a truck to be delivered first thing Sunday morning. We didn't get home Saturday night until 3:30 in the morning and then had to be up at 8:30 to go deliver them. Our trees were "A Wicked Tree," this was made for a boy who loved all sorts of spiders and crawling things. They had big spiders on the tree. "Heal the World," was made by one of the doctors and his wife for a little boy who's 3 and has Leukimia and loves spiderman. "A Quilting Tree," came with an acutaly old quilting machine and a couple of handmade quilts. "Calling the Angles," was made for a baby who was only here on this earth for a short period of time. The tree was covered in angels and tons of books about angels and teddy bears galore. Doing this volunteer work is amazing, it totally changes your life to see these children who are sick but their spirtis so high. It made me realize how lucky I am to have a healthy family and how many kids in the world are sick.

So we took the kids up there Wednesday night to walk around and see the amazing trees. We've also made it a tradition to buy the girls matching Christmas dresses that they have their picture with Santa taken. Apparently this year Brookie loved her dress and showed it to anyone that would look.

The two loves of my life!!

Here are just a couple of the hundreds of trees that are there!
This one of course is for Lane!
I'm not quite sure what this one was but I probably took the picture because I thought they did a good job on it! I don't know!
You can't really see this one too good but it's an ice cream tree. It has ice cream scoops on it!
And of course a TWILIGHT tree!! This was was so cool! Again, you can't seee it too good but people do amazing things to these trees and are super creative!! A Cullen Christmas it was the sash says and it had the names of the characters on each of the ornaments. There were presents under the tree with their names as well!


Santa was there and last year Jayden and Brooklyn screamed, this year it was Brooklyn and Kaylie. Jayden apparently has no problem with Santa, while Brookie for some reason is scarred to death of this man. Each year we are going to continue to torture her and hopefully someday she'll come to like him. But as you go from picture to picture, notice how their faces get more and more intense and obviously you can see where the parents are standing!





This picture is to show that we put our Christmas tree up, finally!!