Home for the Holidays

After having a leisurely four days off our house is officially ready for the holidays.    This really is my favorite time of the year.  I can’t say I look forward to decorating and I definitely do not look forward to taking it all down in a month but while it’s up I totally love it.  For the first time ever we have a fake tree.  Not too long ago we vacuumed up yet another pile of needles that had surfaced since the last time a tree was in our house, TWO years ago.  I swear we have pulled the couch out numerous times and had the area rug taken from the house and cleaned during that time span but still the needles persist.   Chris had last week off so on one of his trips to the store he bought a fake tree at the Home Depot.  Which I was happy about until we pulled it out of the box and I noticed it was a flocked tree so we have now traded needles for fake snow which is everywhere.  Two days after making the purchase they were on sale for 20% off.  Such is our life!

One of the most tell tale signs of Christmas at our house is Home for the Holiday candles.  My husband does have a feminine side and this is proof positive.  He has to have them and they are sometimes hard to come by.  We got a Yankee candle catalog in the mail recently and ordered 12 candles total.  They were having some sale and every time I thought I was done the lady taking my order would say “but if you buy one more you’ll get two free” or some other sales pitch I fell for.  So we have our supply of holiday candles which definitely lends to the ambiance.  With the tree and the village lit up and all the other signs of the holidays nothing says Christmas like the aroma of Home for the Holidays.

The village is another contribution of husband dearest.  We have acquired pieces over the 9 years we’ve been married and now we have more than we can put up at one time.  This year we had to pare back even more because we had to get rid of our entertainment center when we got a big screened TV so now the village real-estate is on the parlor table.  It really is quite festive with a barn, a couple shops, a library, a church and a skating pond.  There are various other assorted pieces; skaters, dogs, farm animals, fences, benches, light poles and Christmas trees that used to all have a decorative star on top of them until Timmy made his rounds and bit off all the stars.  We consider ourselves lucky that’s all he did.  He is very small and dainty and didn’t knock one thing over in his travels. 

We were watching a decorating show the other night so I got a couple of ideas.  I filled a vase with cranberries in water and stuck a candle in it and have a bow on the outside. It’s very pretty! I also filled a another vase with shiny bulbs.  I would do a lot more but we really don’t have much display space in our living room.  I’d give anything for a mantle like Krista.  After this year I probably won’t have to worry about it because everything is where the cats can knock it over.  We have this little baby grand piano plays music when you open the keyboard up and has a dancing couple on top.  You can only imagine how enticing that is to two rambunctious teenage cats.  They also love attacking the lights dangling on the tree and the low lying ornaments. 

I was looking through some pictures recently and came across one with a quilted throw my mom gave me that I had forgotten all about.  It’s white and green and red and after a lengthy search I did locate it and now it adorns the back of the couch and really offers a nice punch of color.  Only trouble is the dog keeps trying to bury his toy in it and it won’t last long with that kind of abuse.

Good thing we love our animals because really it just adds to the season.  I can’t wait to get home tonight and put on some nice Christmas tunes and sit back in the dark with only the candles, tree & village lit and admire our handiwork.  We do that a lot. It's very nostalgic, like a big embrace of Christmases passed.