Kids Christmas Trees

I was inspired by my neighbor last year to put a little tree in each of my kid's bedrooms this year for Christmas.  I found these 4 foot pre-lit trees at Garden Ridge and knew they'd be perfect for their rooms. 

I looked online for ornament sets and lots on eBay and wasn't having much luck.  I wasn't interested in paying high prices for ornamnents for kids and I didn't want breakable ones in their bedrooms.  I mean, seriously, look at these Target prices. The individual ones were glass.  No thanks to glass and no thanks to $8.00 each.

Then I an idea.  I gathered up several Happy Meal toys* from the basement, added in a few things I found at the dollar store and garage sales and made my own ornaments. 

 

I started by adding little eye hooks to the tops of the toys.  Some of the harder plastic ones I poked at with a needle thing but I didn't even need to pull out the drill.  Twisting them in was doing a number on my fingers though so I did use needle nose pliers for that.  Sorry, little pony.  This will only hurt for a minute.

 

Then I added thin ribbon to hang them on the tree.  I didn't want hooks in their rooms.

 

 The trees were so user friendly I literally took them out of the box, fluffed a few branches and plugged them in.  That's my kind of tree.  Here's the pink one full of Hello Kitty (I did find a few recently in the dollar spot at Target), Strawberry Shortcake, Sesame Street figures, My Little Ponies and Disney Princesses.

 
And here's the blue one full of superheros, Star Wars figures, and Transformers.

 
I surprised the kids with them the night before we went to the downtown Christmas lighting parade.  They have played with them daily since and I'm glad we have a new tradition for their rooms each year.
 
*Before you go all "mother-of-the-year" on me for the amount of toys I have just know that my neighbor works for McDonald's and hooks us up often with sets of Happy Meal toys.  And then I scored at a garage sale because this is all the crap no one wants.  I got an entire bag of boys toys for $1.00.