Christmas - Decor

I love Christmas.  Love, love, LOVE Christmas.  I’m kind of a crazy person when it comes to this holiday.  Decorations always go up the day after Thanksgiving.  Our house is decorated inside and out.  Not one room is untouched and left bare of festive décor.  Christmas music is blasting all weekend long while these tasks get completed….and yes it takes at least all weekend long.  It’s somewhat of an obsession.

I blame the military.  Yep.  And there’s a splash of logic behind this accusation too.  You see, growing up I was constantly forced to uproot my life.  Moving didn’t just mean new schools and new friends.  It also meant losing consistency and routine.  Which isn’t all bad...but it can be really difficult for a youngster (heck, who am I kidding.  It’s still really hard sometimes!) to constantly pick up and change pretty much everything in life. 

For me, part of my defense mechanism was latching onto traditions.  If we did it once, it became a “tradition” in my head and then I begged and pleaded to do that very same activity again next year.  Because that activity was the same.  Yes, I enjoyed adding new activities with each new location.  But I craved that consistency that made the holiday different from the rest of my life.  Holidays became special, simply because they were predictable.

While this year added a lot of newness to my holiday….first Christmas as a married couple, first Christmas in New Mexico….it was really fun to teach Blair my traditions and to learn his.  The blending of our past traditions will be what makes our future OURS. 

Putting up the Christmas tree is always one of the very first things I do.  I LOVE unpacking all the special ornaments and finding the perfect place to accent it’s specific beauty.

Decorating our first Christmas tree together!  It was really fun combining our ornaments and telling the stories behind them.

We positioned our fancy tree right in the center of our little “window” cutout in the entryway so people could see it immediately as they walked in our front door.  :)

Ain’t it perty?  Both of our families had multi-coloured lights growing up, so that is a definite must-keep tradition now.

Of course we had to put up the mistletoe.  ;)  This is actually one of the mistletoe balls that we had at our house every year.  My parents had two, and gave one to me when we got married!

I normally have three large pieces of art above my couch, but they are completely the wrong colour for Christmas.  So I covered them with wrapping paper and hung wooden letters (that I painted gold) from each.

I wanted a little something to make the windows festive.  My family always put candles in the windowsill.  I found some at the Dollar Store that worked perfectly.  And then I hung some candy canes to give it a pop of colour.

It was not just our first Christmas as a married couple, but it was also Dolce’s very first Christmas ever!  She LOVED having the house decorated.  It was problematic.  She climbed the tree and batted at all the ornaments.  She ate the wrapping paper off of the presents.  She clawed my Christmas rug.  *sigh*  But, once in a while, she was calm and absolutely adorable.

Also, I made our stockings!  It’s a family tradition that I absolutely hold dear.  It all started with my great grandmother.  She made a few for my grandmother and her family.  Since then, my Grandma and Mom have been making them for new family additions. 

This is my Grandma’s mantle:

Now that I’m married, this year was my first attempt at making stockings.  I had to make three for Blair (one for our house, one for my mom’s house, and one for my grandma’s house) and one for me.  I tried to completely recreate mine as closely as I could…because, you know, it’s tradition.  lol   I think they turned out really well!  You can find out how I made them on my Art of Domesticity blog.

I even made a much smaller / simpler version for our cute poofy-tailed kitty.  Hehe

I’m bummed, and really surprised, that we forgot to get a picture of the outside of the house, with all the fancy lights.  But alas, we are lame.  However…..we hosted our community group one night during the holidays, and one of the sweet little girls (Anika) said “Mommy, their house looks like a gingerbread house!”  I LOVED it!!