20 pics of my glass and crystal Christmas tree

My love of Christmas and Christmas tree decorations is decades old.

For about 10 years from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, I sewed my own soft decorations and mailed them in Christmas cards to friends and family. There were stars and snowmen, candy canes and canaries.

At some point I stopped making decorations for everybody else and began collecting unique pieces for myself.

When I moved to The United Arab Emirates with my then husband in 1993, I began dolling up my non-traditional overseas trees with Swarovski crystal.

Wherever we traveled, I picked up something different and beautiful, and my husband made a point of giving me the Swarovski snowflake of the year deccie as a gift each Noel.

I probably have enough homemade, collectible and crystal decorations for three or four trees now, but none saw the light of day from 2004 when I separated from my husband and my world turned upside down.

In 2013, I unpacked my crystal decorations for the first time in almost a decade. This year I did the same.  I was a bit late and I didn’t finish the tree until yesterday, Christmas Day. I’ll leave it up until January 29, the day after my birthday.

It’s tough to capture just how beautiful the glass and crystal tree is, but here’s my best attempt: