Deck The Halls and Trim The Tree

It is really starting to feel like Christmas in the Shenandoah Valley. Last night we got our first snow that wasn’t more than a couple of flakes floating around for a few minutes. The kids woke up to a ground covered with snow. They spend some time outside today, but it was super windy and way too cold for them to enjoy the inch or so of snow out there. They ate as much as they could and wrestled with the fact that they were uncomfortably cold and there wasn’t really enough snow to really play in. After they were painfully numb, they came in ate a bunch of cookies, drank some hot chocolate and we finished decorating the tree.

It took us way to long to get the tree up last year and even longer to get it down. It feels so good to get the tree up and the dining room completely decorated. We put the tree up in the dining room since it is the biggest room that the babies aren’t allowed in. For years we also had a couch in the dining room to, but I just moved it out a few weeks ago. It is nice to have a dining room without a couch and a bunch of other furniture in it, it is not so cramped any more. This is also the first year that we actually managed to get all of the decorations up that we wanted to get up. Our tree also has both white and colored lights on it. I put up 3 strands of white lights and then the next 5 strands that I pulled out were all broken. The next three strands I pulled out were colored lights, so I tossed those on. It looked very strange, but we couldn’t find the bin with the other lights in them. I was feeling lazy and happy that I had any lights on the tree at all. Today we found the long lost bin with the last of the white lights. So I tossed those on, so now I think we have something like 10 strands of lights on.

I am usually not a big fan of the colored lights on the tree. I love the way the white lights are so much brighter and light up all the decorations. We only put up about 1/2 of our decorations and I am over the top excited at how nice the tree looks with both the colored and white lights and how nice the rest of the room looks.