Our Christmas Home

Welcome to our Christmas home!

This is the first year we've used this lantern as a Christmas decoration and I love the way it looks. It was so easy to set it on cotton and wrap pine and fresh holly around the bottom. I think it looks very elegant too.
After the tragedy if having to leave real trees behind for fake{translation: not real at all}a few years ago, the tree and I have come to terms and decided to be friends. Not best friends, just friends. Real or fake, its always exciting to see how beautiful and different the tree will be every year when all the lights and decorations are on.

If you know me at all, you know that I love 1) stars 2) silver and 3) anything sparkly. That pretty much sums up my feelings about our tree topper.

This is my Baby's First Christmas horse; my very favorite of all our tree decorations and the one I put on first every year. As much as I love it, I don't know if I'll be able to take it with me for my own tree when I have my own house because the tree "at home" wouldn't seem the same without it!

We take our mantle decorating very seriously. We've had many different, shall we say, ideas and themes that have shown up over the years, but we alw

ays have up the church, house, and little tiny people. One year Aaron put up his little green Army men at strategic battle locations throughout the landscape which was really a strech , but I allowed* them only in honor of our friends serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The snowmen in the back have been given as gifts over the years and we usually try to buy atlest one new figurine a year.

* The "I allowed" is used in the sense of 'the amount of power the big sister who is the chief Christmas decorator' yields.

Notes:

* The glass vase filled with the pretty red and gold ornaments started out as an ornament wreath about two weeks ago. After repeated tries and failures, I decided to simply put the ornaments into the vase thereby making just about the easiest possible decoration ever.
* I made wreath in the top right using Christmas tags from gifts Daniel and Erika gave us last year. They were to pretty to throw away so I hot glue-gunned them to a wreath form of some sort{thats just the type of concrete fact I'm known for}I bought at Michaels. I really like it because its different from any of the Christmas decor we already had.
* The bobble head baseball player standing on the rooftop is Luis Gonzalez, coming to you straight from the Cheerios box about eight years ago. He really has served no purpose in our household at all but we've had him for so long now we wouldn't know what to do without him. Feel free to snicker about that last sentence. And so he generally resides on the piano, the mantle, or where ever else he is in the way likes. Someone thought he'd look good up on the roof and while I took him off to take a good picture of the mantle, I thought we should have atlest one picture of him to pass on to future generations. After all, Christmas is made of memories like that.

Thanks so much for stopping by; I hope you've enjoyed our Christmas home! I hope your Christmas will be a happy, beautiful, joyful time filled with all the people and things you love, and with the memory of why we really celebrate Christmas!

And I even hope it will be filled with stars, silver and sparkly things too. ♥

Christmas is forever, not for just one day,
for loving, sharing, giving, are not to put away
like bells and lights and tinsel, in some box upon a shelf.
The good you do for others is good you do yourself...
~Norman Wesley Brooks, "Let Every Day Be Christmas," 1976