Decorating

Christmas is here again, oh Christmas is here again, this won-drous day of joy and glad-ness! I love that song. We decorated our little place for the season this week. We’ve never lived the same place for 2 Christmases in a row, so it’s always… interesting to see how we adapt our few little decorations to each new space.

Hang on—I have to show you our permanent décor before I show you the Christmasy stuff we added to it. A few weeks ago, I spent a day poking our walls full of holes and hanging our jumbled assortment of pictures all over the place.

I think they go with our jumbled assortment of couches quite well.

Here’s the “symmetrical wall.” I love my big pictures of Jay and Rose. When I’m in a bad mood or stressed out, I just look at our gallery of pictures, and they make me feel so much better.

The hallway has our diplomas and the year-by-year puzzle piece kids picture thingy ma bob. We put one picture per year for each kid on the puzzle. My Mom did one of all 5 of her kids, and I always knew I’d do one with my kids. So there it is.

Ok, now back to the Christmas cheer!

This little red guy was the hands-down FAVORITE tree ornament of my childhood. You squeeze his little cheeks, and his mouth opens to reveal a Hershey’s kiss. (what’s not to love?) This year when Jay discovered it at my parents’ house, he opened the stale kiss inside and fed it to the little guy. Since there was already an eye missing and the yarn would’ve been tough to clean, we ended up just tossing his dirty, furry-lipped self into the trash. One more link to my childhood: severed.

ANYWAYS, Usually we get our Christmas stuff out the day after Thanksgiving, but this year we didn’t get around to it till December 1st. We watched the Browns decorate their tree, AND the Whites do theirs before we did ours. A lot of the decorating steam had already been let off by then, so we did ours nice n fast.

The first thing I hung up was actually the advent calendar that I threw together the night before December 1st. I made little pouches by folding wrapping paper and taping the edge shut. Then I put a few little things in each one and clipped them to a ribbon along that weird plastic thing that’s above our window. It’s very quaint and cottagey-homemade, but I like how it turned out.
[If you’re curious about what’s inside each bag, I put a puzzle piece to a manger scene puzzle, a scripture, and an activity or two for each day. I found the puzzle and scriptures online.]

Jeff went down and dug our Christmas boxes out of our closet in the basement. For the record, we are devoted to real live Christmas trees. When we were in student housing, though, there was a no-live-tree policy in the apartments. So we got this skinny fake tree. Now we only get a real tree when we’re going to stay in our own home for Christmas. So far that’s only happened once.

Colored lights go on first. Can you tell that I’m wearing my famous Christmas tree headband? (I love my shadow when I wear that thing). Jay is giving me a funny look like, “what is that big green thing on her head? I want one.”

Rose had fun mangling this red bow while we finished decorating the tree.

It’s hard to keep a tree decorated with two curious children around.

I tried to get a picture of Rose with my headband on, but she was too quick for me.

Jay finally had his turn with the headgear. This is the best I could do for a kids-under-the-tree picture.

I prefer a star at the top of the tree (the symbolism and all), but I have not been able to find or make a good star for our tree yet. This star is a piece of yellow paper that I taped to the tree’s tip a few years ago. I know, I know, TACKY! But sadly it’s the best I’ve managed so far, and believe me, I’ve tried lots of things. Sadly, too many of the crafty ideas I have don’t actually work when I try to make them. So this year, Jeff lynched an angel up there (she is hanging by string wrapped around her neck) and then I tucked the bent paper star behind her.

The whole tree, all lit up. (that’s another of my star experiments hanging in the middle—I worked so hard on it, and then noticed that it has 6 points instead of 5. For some reason it seemed too Jewish for a CHRISTmas tree. [Yarg, I feel like that was a dangerous statement to make. But there you go. I didn’t mean it in any bad way, and I know that Jesus was born a Jew, but it just didn’t look right up top on our tree.]

The last things to go up were the stockings. They needed a little doctoring before they were ready to be displayed. I sewed them a few years ago and ironed Mom, Dad, and Joseph onto them with fusible fleece. Well, none of us go by those names, so they never really felt like OURS. I peeled off the letters, cut out some new ones, and now we have…

No, Jeff and I don’t go by Ma and Pa, but those letters are HARD to cut out, so I went for short and easy. Plus I enjoy the allusion to The Night Before Christmas although I think it may be Mama, instead of Ma in that poem. Oh well, we will be Ma and Pa for now. Maybe next year our identities will change again…oh, and don’t look too closely at the Pa stocking, or you’ll see the print of the D from Dad, and it may look like PAD.

Ah, homemade Christmas décor in its patchy, rustic glory. There’s nothing quite like it.