Is It Christmas Or Is It Summer ?!

Can you believe it, Christmas is just around the corner! It is hard for me to keep in mind that Christmas is a week away. Especially when it has been in the upper 70’s here. The other night I found myself grocery shopping in a short sleeve shirt, capris, and flip flops. Can you believe it, summer cloths in the middle of December! Well that is beside the point. Ya’ll (yes that is considered a word down here in the south) probably want to see all the festive decorations around and about in our home. This year has been lots of fun decorating. Mainly because I have a house to decorate, and it helps that Valerie is starting to understand the holidays. She gets excited every time she sees Christmas lights on a house or a Christmas tree. She always says “ooooo predy”. This year Caleb and I started a new family tradition for us. We went out and cut our own tree. Well okay not exactly. We did go to a tree farm but it never dawned on us that the elevation and heat here are not conducive to the type of Christmas tree both Caleb and I were used to. They all looked like Charlie Brown trees or over grown juniper bushes :( Luckily for us the tree farm goes up into the mountain in North Carolina and cuts down North Carolina Frasher Firs, and they look and smell like Christmas. What is nice about this is the tree cost just as much or a little bit cheaper then going to one of those parking lot tree shops. Even better is our tree was cut down the Monday after Thanksgiving, and all the parking lot trees are normally cut in the end of October!!! So enough jibber gabber here are the pictures of our festive house. . .

Us at the tree farm

Caleb cutting off the stub so we can put the Christmas tree up. Fallow the pictures. It wasen't hard at first but because the tree was so fresh as Caleb was cutting the sap would stick to the saw.

Here is our grown up Christmas tree (live tree). It is decorated in jewel tones. My mom decided that jewel tones wasn’t fun enough sounding so she has nicknamed it the Mardi Gras tree. Hints the brightly colored Peacock ordainment she sent me.

Here is our kid tree. Since we got a real tree this year we had our old fake tree still. I decided to put it to good use. The inspiration did come from all the Hallmark Cryola crayon ordainments my mother-in-law collected every year for Caleb since he was born. I went out and bought a box of 64 Cryola crayons and hot glued them to hangers. I then used the box they came in for a tree toper. If I can say so myself it turned our really well.

Finally here are some of the decorations around the house. I will have to admit I caught on to my mother-in-law’s love of the Christmas holiday. We were the first in our neighborhood to hang Christmas lights, and the Monday after Thanksgiving I brought out all of my Christmas decorations and decorated the house.

View of the Mardi Gras tree from the Entryway

If you click on the picture it will get bigger and you can see it better :)