2016 Christmas Decorating

There are so many things we’ve done that I haven’t blogged about and wish I had. I love looking back years later and reading the posts. Pictures alone don’t always help me remember. One of my goals is to remedy that by posting something when I have a few minutes here or there.

I had a few minutes this morning, so I decided to look at recent pictures and randomly decide what to blog about. Brilliant method, don’t you think?

So, that’s  how you get this year’s decorating extravaganza!

Okay, so I was a little too busy helping to get pictures. But here are a few!

We have never been a designer tree kind of family. We love lights and personal ornaments.

Each child – well, really, each family member – has a stack of ornaments collected through the years.

Some are personalized, and therefore truly belonging to each person.

Others are just chosen favorites. Then we have our family collection of Calliope dough ornaments, mostly made up of a penguin family selection for each year.

Between ornaments collected as Doug and I were growing up and ornaments collected in our 18 years of marriage, we have too many for one tree. In Almyra, we enjoyed setting up two trees, one in the living room and the other in our office/school room. When we moved here last year, we just set up one tree and didn’t hang all of the ornaments. This year, though, Doug and I have a slightly different arrangement in our bedroom – different enough to fit a tree up there!

We’ve always talked about a tree in our room, just because we love Christmas trees, and this year we were able to do it! So, we put most of our childhood and personal favorite ornaments up there.

Throw in stockings, Christmas books, and few stuffied, and our various nativities (these are just a few – my favorites are the international nativities not in these pictures), plus a few select favorites in each bedroom, and we’re all decorated! At least inside…the next weekend, we moved outside.

Doug and James headed up to the roof to hang lights. Remember those huge house lights that used to adorn every house? Doug and I grew up with those, and we were excited when we found new and improved LED versions of those same lights! No more little tangley twinkles around here!

Once James finished on the roof, he helped Angela with some greenery on the front steps.

We needed some shrubbery trimmed and carted away, so Olivia dove into that while I finished setting up the wood nativity Dad made for us a few years ago.

Angie & Steven pitched in as soon as she and James were done with the porch.

Poor Cookie did NOT like being in the back yard by himself while the rest of us were in the front yard. (Oh, and he really wasn’t happy with the idea of Doug on the roof!) He dashed for the gate every time it was opened for a load of sticks to be taken back to the burn pile. So, I put the halter and leash on him and brought him out from to join the fun. He definitely gave me my workout for the day!!

Of course, he was always happiest when Steven stopped to say hi!