decorating for christmas

we get to put up our tree today! i'm really looking forward to it. i got the rest of the decorations put up yesterday. last summer hubby and i went to this "swap meet" of free stuff he read about on craigs list. yeah, it was full of crap. clothes and shoes even savers wouldn't take, food and energy drinks that were two years out of date, and random pieces of christmas trees. and random garlands. so after looking at the land fill that was supposedly the swap meet, i spied the garlands. and snagged a bunch. i really wish now i had spent more time and gotten more, because i love garlands, but they are pretty pricey. but we have garlands on our house outside, and over our french doors, and over the big window in the kitchen, and over the mirrored closet doors in the front entry. i would love to put some on our railing and over the rest of the windows! i also used leftover red ribbon from our wedding to put through the garlands and it is just so. cute. i love christmas decorations. the twinkly lights make me happy!

growing up, decorating for christmas was an all day event. my mom is an interior designer and is really into holiday decorating--and it always looks awesome. like we paid a designer to do it. we had two trees, the family tree and the one in our front room that matched the decor. we had garlands on the stairs, a cute santa shower curtain in the bathroom, stockings and lights on the bathroom mirrors, a christmas village that has grown over the years, a nativity (that we painted as a family) in the front yard. i loved christmas in my house. our home was transformed, it was so magical, so fun. when we were a little older my parents got us each a mini-tree for our rooms, and let us put up lights in there as well.

every year since i was born, i have been given an ornament. a few, actually. one from my parents, one from my grandmother, and one from my aunt. the same with my four siblings. so as you can imagine, the older we got, the more full our tree became. the last few years i was living at home there was no way we could fit all of the ornaments on the tree. we had to pick about half of our ornaments to put up every year so the tree wasn't drowned in ornaments! as a kid i adored cats, kittens, kitties, everything having to do with them. so a lot of my ornaments are cats. i loved putting up my kitty ornament collection every year. i'm excited to put it up again this year.

i think we are going to have a really fun time with our tree and little buddy. we will be getting a lot of exercise keeping him away from it! i know he's not quite old enough to "get" the whole concept of christmas yet, but i'm so excited to start showing him everything. he is already enthralled by the lights in our garlands.