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By Jennie Guido

I will admit it. I’m a bit of a Christmas fanatic. I try my hardest to wait until my birthday in November to decorate the inside of my house and always wait until after the turkey has been put away from Thanksgiving to tackle the outside.

When you put up as many themed trees as I do, it takes some time and effort to get them all right.

Each room of my house has a tree of some sort, so my house is quite merry all season long. When your roommates are Beagles and don’t get to have a say in how much I decorate, I tend to over-decorate.

The first tree that goes up each year and is the last to take down is my bedroom tree. The tree itself was an after-Christmas special we found at Kohl’s one year, and I’m pretty sure it was a display that they simply slapped a price tag on. I like to layer garland throughout it with simple white lights. The ornaments are the real show stopper, though. They are all of the pastel gems of my grandmother’s, Doris Guido, collection. She was quite the decorator herself for the holidays, and I love nothing more than putting this tree up every year.

My next trees to decorate belong to the kitchen, my office, and the dining room. My office features a simple tinsel tree with mini-color lights and all of my Hallmark ornaments I collected growing up. I have almost every Holiday Barbie, Scarlet O’Hara, and Madame Alexander ornament they created.

In the kitchen, I have two tinsel trees that feature ornaments only pertaining to food. You will find everything from measuring spoons to miniature mixers and cocktails to Brussels sprouts. These are the easiest ornaments to find and go well with the large-bulb color lights I use.

In the dining room, I actually have two different trees in there this year. One is my birds and squirrels tree that also features a couple of Beagles and a Black Labrador or two. It’s all of their favorite things to hunt, except for frogs. I refuse to decorate my house with frogs.

I also have a gold beaded tree on my dining room table this year as my centerpiece that I picked up last year at Nest. I’ll be honest. I put that tree up for Halloween and used ceramic pumpkin ornaments that my sister made. Now, it features the paper Christmas village that Sarah Lindsey Laukhuff created several years ago. All of Natchez’s finest bedeck the tree and will probably stay as my centerpiece through January. Why not?

The real star of the show in my house is the tree in my living room. It’s a real tree, which has been painted white and flocked with over five pounds of flocking compound. The process is tedious and usually takes a full day to dry properly, but it has been a Guido family tradition for decades.

Many of you remember riding past my grandmother’s house on Mansfield Drive and seeing her tree each year. The fatter the tree the better it was to fill her bay window. When I was house hunting 10 years ago, I knew that my house on Auburn could easily carry on the tradition with its large picture windows in the living room. Sure. A fake flocked tree would be really simple and probably save me some money. But I don’t need Doris Guido haunting me from the grave every Christmas.