M E R R Y C H R I S T M A S !
I love my home, especially at Christmas. I am a deeply sentimental person. Almost everything I do or decorate with, especially this time of year has meaning.
WARNING: This blog entry is very sappy!
Welcome!
Since I have ZERO decorating skills I always go with what I think is "safe" (i.e. simple and symmetrical.)
After our first Christmas together I was cleaning up our holiday decorations. I took our stack of Christmas cards, letters and pictures and threw them away. It made me sick when I looked at them in the trash so I pulled them out and put them in a book. Since then I have saved every Christmas card, letter, picture as well as baby and wedding announcement from family and close friends and kept them by year in this book. It's so fun to go back and read them.
My heart is in this box! This has to be my most favorite thing to pull out of our Christmas decorations. Each ornament has some sort of meaning, memory or represents some sort of significant event in our family. Every year we buy a locket and put in two pictures that will remind us what happened that year. We have several other framed ornaments with pictures of family and friends who we miss this time of year.
I bought this on eBay. Apparently it was on Santa's sleigh in the Chicago Thanksgiving Day Parade last year (2006). I have it placed by our Polar Express book to help us remember to BELIEVE!
The Christmas I was pregnant with Vale I bought a table top Christmas tree for his room along with a strand of colored twinkling lights and set it up in the nursery. Jared thought I was crazy but I knew in a couple years Vale would love to go to sleep at night with the twinkling lights. In each of the boxes of our advent calendar is an ornament to decorate his tree as we count down to Christmas! Turns out Vale can't sleep unless it's pitch black and the ornaments I bought are all choking hazards. Next year!
I did it. I finally have enough books. Although half of them are not all that interesting to Vale, not yet anyway. He (we) did fall in love with Snowmen at Night and Snowmen at Christmas!
This is one of my all time favorite Christmas stories by Richard Paul Evans. Great message!
This was given to Vale last year as a gift from my sister, Sarah. He knows who Baby Jesus is as well as Mary and Joseph. As he gets older, I'm looking forward to using it to teach Vale the story of the birth of Jesus.
