It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

Today I will be taking part in one of my most favorite activities!  We are decorating our house for Christmas!!! 

Now hold on.  Before you start to throw stones at me and accuse me of not giving Thanksgiving its propor honor, allow me to explain the timing.  On Friday we will be leaving to travel to New Mexico for the Thanksgiving Holiday to spend time with some of Breanne's family.  We will not be getting back until the Sunday after Thanksgiving.  Once we get back, I'm sure we will be pretty busy and the time to decorate is just not there.  At least, not as early as we would like it.  So we decided that ideally we would want to come home to a house that was already dressed up in Christmas cheer!  Besides, Christmas only comes once a year and we want to maximize as much of the holiday season as possible!  So we are going to put up our decorations tonight!

We even have a few of our very own christmas traditions that we started a few years ago.  Every year while we are putting up our decorations we watch the movie "Elf".  It is definitely one of my favorite Christmas movies.  Will Ferrill is hysterical!   We also make hot chocolate and continue to play Christmas music once the movie is over.  It takes us a while to decorate.  We have a lot of stuff.

We have our main tree that is designated as the "pretty" tree.  Its the one that is color coordinated with red, silver and black ornaments.  The ornaments are symetrically placed on the tree with great care and there is an enormous amount of lights on it.  We have a secondary tree that is only 3 or 4 feet tall.  This tree is designated as the "everything else" tree.  This is where we put special ornaments from growing up or any other fun ones that we just happen to like, but do not match the "pretty" tree.  We even have a tiny miniature tree for Julia's room and we bought a little pack of Sesame Street character ornaments for it. We also put lighted garland along the top of our cabinets, which also requires me precariously walking across our counter tops trying not to fall.  One of these years, I'm sure I will.  Finally we have a Christmas village, but sadly, I think they will remain in their boxes this year.  Because Julia has taken over portions of our living room with all of her toys, we will have to just have to do without it this year.  However, we will get to bring back Julia's Little People Nativity Set.  She loved it last year so I'm excited to see her play with it more this year.

I'm so excited to just have time with the family tonight and to continue these traditions with Julia.  I'm sure she will be an awesome help at decorating.  She probably won't drive me crazy at all!  Sarcasm intended.  I imagine that a bulk of the decorating will be accomplished after she goes to bed.