Decorating for Christmas

If you have been reading my blog for any length of time, you probably know what a scrooge I am and how I detest decorating for Christmas! In fact, last year, we only put up our stockings, and put up our tree on December 23rd.

Now, lest you feel the need to leave me a nasty comment, I had a reason why we didn't put up our tree until right before Christmas.

Brynne and I read the book An Early American Christmas by Tomie DePaola last year. Feeling a little world-weary, reading this book and about the simplicity of the colonial traditional Christmas spoke to me. It actually made me smile and feel immense peace. So, we had an old-fashioned Christmas last year. All of our decorations were homemade (except for the stockings.)

You can read most of my posts on this by going to this link. (And I recommend you do it. It was amazing!)

Part of the old-fashioned Christmas included buying a ball and burlap tree so that after Christmas we could plant it in our backyard. We honestly thought it would die, but it made it through the record snows this past winter and the record heat this summer. We want to do this same thing again this year. But with a ball and burlap tree, you can't keep it up very long.

Eli's birthday is on December 22nd, so this actually worked out great! We could concentrate on his birthday and then on the 23rd we put up the tree and started getting ourselves ready for Christmas.

And that is what we are planning to do this year, too.

But instead of an old-fashioned Christmas, we decided to do our traditional decorations, including house lights (we didn't even do that last year.)

Since most of my family was gone this Thanksgiving break, I had time to put up our decorations. I will admit, I still didn't enjoy it. But, I think the glass of wine helped somewhat. I got everything up in record time (except for the tree and outside decorations that will be done a bit later.)

The house looks great. The kids are happy. And I am relieved that we are ready to start the Christmas season.