Real or Fake?

We actually decorated on November 3rd - a little early, we know, but November was going to be a cah-razy month.  If we didn't do it at that time, it wasn't going to get done until a week before Christmas.  As I would hear family, friends and co-workers shun those that had started decorating for Christmas prior to Thanksgiving, I would quietly bow my head and remove myself from the conversation.

The only part of our house we really "decorate" is the living/dining area.  Someday, I would like to add more holiday decorations to our basement but at this point, it would be frustrating to find a place to store them for the 11 months of the year that they are not needed.  So we mostly just have a tree to put up and stockings to hang.

Selfishly, this is how our tree decorating works.  Emma hands an ornament hook to Daddy, Daddy puts the hook on the ornament, Daddy hands the ornament to Owen, Owen walks the ornament to Mommy, Mommy hangs ornament on tree.  Everyone has a job and gets to feel useful, Mommy gets to make sure the tree looks perfect.  Don't worry - the kids have their own miniature tree in their room to hang all of their special ornaments on!

This is what happens when Owen tries to hang ornaments on the tree - they are all 3 inches off the ground.

My dad is the sewing machine master in the family.  He made me that tree skirt many years ago.

For some reason, I bought like an entire shopping cart full of these sparkly snowflake ornaments from Target when they were on clearance last year.  It seemed like such a good idea at the time - that I would magically come up with all of the uses for them.  So far the only use I've found is hanging a few on the tree.  If anyone else has any ideas of what to do with glittery snowflakes - let me know!

If you would kindly refer back to the title of this post, "Real or Fake", I will tell you what I was referring to.  And no, it isn't my personality or my chest - it's our Christmas tree.  It's fake all the way baby!!!  Had it for 10 years.  Ask my old roommate (Hi Kelli!!).  When Kelli and I lived together, I bought this tree.  The April following Christmas, she had to kindly ask me to take it down.  Oops.  Sorry Kelli.

After the tree was done, we took another one of the centerpiece boxes I had made, this one painted turquoise, and filled it with Christmas decor.  In our house, we don't go for the typical red & green Christmas colors, we go red & turquoise.

Some leftover Christmas balls went in the hurricane vases.

Finally, we hung our stockings on a special coat rack we built last year for our Christmas stockings.  Since we don't have a fireplace, this was our next best alternative.

Hard to believe it was already a month ago when we got all of this stuff out!  In the meantime, we've added the Advent Tree and another fun project that I will show you soon.