Our Christmas decorations are up, and I LOVE having reminders everywhere of the season. I love that I look and see little things that don’t mean much that remind me to slow down. To stop and think about everything. To be slow in this season. I love the beauty that this season brings. Nothing feels more joyful and warm than a home decorated for Christmas. I wanted to share some of our decorations. Not because I’m good at decorating or because we do something awesome out on the yard that involves santa and a tractor. We don’t. But our neighbors do. And it IS awesome. We just have a totally random collection of things we’ve been gifted or have picked up, and it looks random, too. But it serves its purpose and I love it.
This is our first year with a fake tree. We have a real one, too, but since we have this huge window above the garage I thought it screamed for a Christmas tree. So we put this one here, and it looks so good from the street. This window is probably the most noticeable thing about house from the outside, so I’m glad to have this tree here. And we had so much fun decorating it with Jack. He was so helpful and really enjoyed it. He helped put the star on top, too.
And then Tommy finished putting the star up.
I was shocked how helpful this kid was. He LOVED putting ornaments on the tree. He would come grab one from the bin and go to this very spot on the tree and lay the ornament there. It’s hard to tell but that stash of stuff on the tree behind his back is where 95% of his ornaments were placed.
Here he is branching out a little from his usual spot.
I put most of these lights up at night. I was the crazy pregnant lady out on the porch in the dark putting lights up. I had to do it. It was calling me. This front porch has all kinds of Christmas decorating potential. I’m happy with where we ended up this year but who knows what the future holds. The next day I had to tweaking to do, so Jack was my awesome helper.
He was entertained by being outside, Goldfish- or fisheeeeess as he says, and Henry the neighbor’s cat.
This stuff makes me so happy. There is something about this seriously-Christmas-smelling soap that makes washing my hands a pleasure. One is the orange spice Christmas smell and the other smells like a pine tree. Like I literally walked into a forest, rubbed my hands on a pine tree and called that washing them. [Side note: we used to live on Pine Street, so apparently I cannot type pine tree without great effort. My hands automatically kept going to pine street. Must re-train brain now.]
I LOVE this tree. Our little fatty. Since we had the artificial tree upstairs, I didn’t feel like we needed 2 big trees. So we decided to go small. I was thinking understated. We came home with fat. This tree is short and fat and I love it. Also, he’s staying naked– besides the lights. I tried putting ornaments on him, but Jack just wants to pull them all off. For some reason he’s totally cool with ornaments on the upstairs tree but not on the downstairs one?? I kind of love the look of just the tree and the lights though.
Our garage jets out of our house like a giant nose on a face, so Tommy thought we should outline it in lights. I love him for this.
Just little reminders everywhere that Christ is coming.
My favorite of all our inside decorations. Fresh. Green. Beautiful.
And it sits in our dining room which looks like this currently. Tommy’s working furiously on our dining room table right now. I’m so excited I can hardly stand it.
I love this sign my Granny gave me just after we got married. It was our very first Christmas decoration, and I left it up year round hanging above my washing machine. I should find somewhere for it to live all year in this house, too.
Christmas candle– I burn one all the time that I’m home. That nativity scene there— it lived through college with me and unfortunately one year one of the wise men was be-headed in an on-campus housing incident. It was painful. [I actually don’t know what happened but I just found his head laying by his body.] So instead of hot gluing the head back on like a normal person, I put it out year after year with the head laying beside his body. I should probably get that fixed before Jack is old enough to be terrified.
Still working on the mantle. But the biggest piece missing is a stocking for Jack! Last year we weren’t living in our own house at Christmas, so this year I totally forgot little man didn’t have his space claimed on the mantle.
Don’t you have a “Z” under your tree? Jack thinks the alphabet letters are a nice addition to the tree. I found the “U” on the tree the other day, and the “B” and “L” were casualties in a decorating-gone-bad situation. They should make a full recovery.
adventures of jack and me 