I’m in the process of decorating our house for Christmas.  The tree is such a central piece of our decorating, but years ago (7 to be exact) we brought a delightful boy home called Woody (our first boy dog) in September and that following Christmas we went out and bought our tree, set it up and decorated it.  And Woody promptly went over, lifted his leg and relieved himself — on our Christmas tree.  Needless to say I was speechless and completely unaccustomed to the habits of boy dogs.

Then the following February we brought Ellie home as a 7-week-old puppy.  She was soooo cute, but spent all of her waking hours putting things in her mouth.  She didn’t grow out of that until she was about 2, so when Christmas rolled around the next year, we decided we needed a tree that was out of reach for both of the dogs.  We have a small table top tree that did the trick and that we still use, but I miss how a room feels with a larger tree.

I saw this pin on Pinterest and followed the link.  Unfortunately the link is just a photograph, but it’s a good picture and I was able to figure out what they did.  We have a lot of trees and a lot of good sized tree branches so I saved a few and cut them up today.  I shared in an earlier post that we discovered that Ellie likes to help in the yard by catching dirt.  I found out today she also likes catching sawdust.  She’s a weird dog!

So back to my tree.  I cut the branches into 7 pieces with the longest being 3 1/2′ down to 6″.  Each smaller branch is 6″ shorter that the previous one.  I then roughly painted them with a cream colored acrylic paint and Mike helped me to attach them to the wall.  We ran a strand of white lights and I hung glass ornaments with fishing line.  I still need to fashion a star out of twigs and add more ornaments and maybe some tinsel.  Here is what it looks like so far.  I think I really like this one and I also think it’s going to be hard to take it down after the holidays.  Maybe it could become a holiday tree and I could decorate it for all occasions throughout the year?  We’ll see…

“Was it really necessary to tell them about the tree incident?  Did they really have to know that?”