Lights at Christmas

This year we didn't think we could get lights up on Charlie Brown, so we chose to do the bushes at the corner of the deck instead. They are nice -- we can see them better from the living room windows.

But I feel that we have let Charlie down. He has been the Christmas tree since we bought him five or six years ago. That year my sisters and I and our husbands had Christmas together without Mom and Dad.
We didn't name the tree Charlie Brown. In fact it was several years later, after we had planted it out in the yard in a place visible to the neighbors, that we heard them refer to it that way. I think they called it that because this is not a standard blue spruce, and it grows a bit asymetrically and is smaller and less full - you could probably call it awkward.
But those qualities are exactly why I love it - I would never plant a blue spruce 30 feet away from the house on the south side unless is was a type that would never get to be huge and full. In our climate spruce is a great tree for the northwest side of the house, to block the winter winds.