Christmas Trees at the Mormon Temple

Christmas evening, I headed out to Kensington, Maryland to the Mormon Temple's Festival of lights. I decided to post the Christmas trees first - - I'll post the lights later. The festival of lights will continue through December 30th.

I would recommend looking at the lights outside first and then coming inside, where it is warm. Now, you don't actually get to go into the Mormon Temple (only Mormons can go in the temple), when I say "inside" you are going into the Visitor Center.

In the visitor center, they have regional Christmas trees decorated with dolls from different parts of the world. The tree below is decorated with dolls from Asian countries.

Here is a close-up of some of the dolls, which had been donated by the various embassies.

This is the European tree. The photo below this tree shows the detail of a couple of the dolls on the tree.


The tree below is the African tree. Not as full as the other trees. Hmm, did the the African continent embassies not send as many dolls? The photo below shows the detail of some of the items around the African tree.

There were two trees on either side of the Jesus statue. The photo of the Jesus statue is shown above in my blog intro photo. As you can tell, there were a lot of people, despite it being Christmas Evening, checking out the lights.

Yes, there was a house inside the visitor center. The house is used to depict the importance of family to Mormons. In the home, they had a display about researching family history.

Next to the family history alcove, was this tree. While I am not a Mormon, my family has been very good about researching and maintaining our family tree. I spent 5 years scanning hundreds of antique pictures of my family, I thought this tree was neat. It had family pictures used as ornaments.

Here are details of the ornaments. I liked the garland also, ovals tied together with gold ribbon with words that are the "fruit of the spirit" written on the ovals. I think I may do something like this for my tree next year.

The remaining trees were decorated by the various Mormon churches in the Washington, DC area.

I found the tree below was interesting. I liked the blue star beaded ornaments. Not sure what I think about the gold straw things sticking up from the top of the tree.

I really liked this tree below, maybe because it looks a lot like my tree. Yes, I was getting tree decorating ideas for next year (I love Christmas and decorating for Christmas). For garland, this tree had a leaf garland - - how clever! I am going to throw the berry garland I have around my tree out because the cats keep eating the berries off the garland - - and they aren't real berries! The fabric leaf garland may hold up better.

I also loved the berry wreaths with the birds. I have berry wreaths on my my tree and they have been pretty much been left alone by the cats. I wonder if I incorporated birds -- how long they would last on my tree?

My next blog will feature the lights on the grounds of the Mormon Temple. And that will end my blog series, Christmas in DC.