Christmas Prep

The shopping is done, the cards are mailed, the gifts are wrapped, but the decorating?

Not so much.

We usually decorate our house like crazy for Christmas, with multiple large trees,

a different theme in every room, etc.  We even decorate the guest room and bathrooms!

This year?  We did one tree.  And most of the family room decorations.  Sad, I know.

A few weeks ago someone else shared pictures of her beautifully decorated house

and I thought I'd play along and post pictures of our decorations, too.

I'd just have to wait until the next week because I wasn't ready yet.

Guess what.  Several weeks later I'm STILL not ready!

I'll share what I have been able to get done so far and if I have a chance

to get any more decorations up, I'll update with more pictures.

Since we spend the most time in there, we decided the family room was a priority.

That room usually has beach colors, but in the winter I switch it up for more of a

ski lodge/woodland theme.

I have been collecting vintage winter sports equipment since we got married 

and have stumbled across quite a few steals over the years.

Like this pair of vintage wood skis I found on craigslist.

 

 I picked them up from an elderly gentleman (his daughter had listed them)

who used to wear them to ski the alps! 

He had the most adorable accent and hearing him talk about actually

using them makes them even more special to me. 

Plus the thirty-dollar price tag beats Pottery Barn's

three-hundred-dollar-plus-tax-and-shipping "Found Skis" any day!

This other pair of skis I found at a local antique store two summers ago only set me back fifteen dollars,

including the wooden poles!

The little girl's white skates were three dollars at the Salvation Army thrift store and the boy's skates were less than ten at the antiques store.

The snowshoes were the most difficult to find. 

 They were listed on craigslist ($25) and when I picked them up, the owner

took me down to the basement (not as scary as it sounds) and proceeded to show me

his entire taxidermy collection before he gave me the snowshoes. 

Then he showed me how he had rewoven them by hand out of rawhide. 

He said he wore them to hunt these certain little white owl-looking birds that hide in snowdrifts. 

And he showed me a couple of them that he had stuffed. 

Being a vegetarian and huge animal-lover, it was a lot for me to take in and still keep

a smile on my face and act interested in his work. 

He wanted me to try on the snowshoes so he could show me how to adjust the leather straps

and I didn't have the heart to tell him I was buying them as a decoration!

This toboggan was a birthday gift from my parents to Michael before we even got married. 

My mom had found it at a yard sale and it's one of our favorite gifts ever.

We have several snow sleds that never made it out this year, but with all of Carter's baby equipment all over the family room, there's no room for them anyway!  I put some stuff on the hearth, and that's about as far as I got...

Our stockings were finally delivered, but I didn't have a chance to snap a picture after we put them up.

On top of the entertainment center, we have an antique birdhouse.

At Christmastime, I add evergreen trees and a few deer and the birdhouse

looks kind of like a cozy cabin nestled in the woods.

There are usually white Christmas lights on the "snow", uplighting everything, but I didn't get a chance to add them yet.

We had great ideas about starting a family tradition of cutting down a live tree,

but practicality won out and we brought out one of the artificial trees instead.

This one is five or six years old and soon after I took these pictures, a large section of the

lights went out, so maybe we will be starting the "real" tree tradition next year!

After years of trying to carefully vacuum dust bunnies around the tree without sucking up

our tree skirt, I was over it.  But I couldn't leave the ugly stand exposed either.
A while ago I had bought an old wine barrel to make into a dog bed for Molly.
Like so many plans, it never happened, but it came in very handy for hiding the tree stand!

For the garland, I went to the craft store and purchased an entire roll of upholstery webbing for

about $13 with my 40% off coupon.  It's over 100 feet long which is more than enough for our whole tree.

The best thing was that after I bought it, I saw the EXACT webbing at Pottery Barn for some outrageous price like $10 or $15 per yard.  It was called "Burlap Ribbon" or something like that.  They even showed it being used as garland on a Christmas tree.  Michael was impressed with my thriftiness when I showed him the catalog!

So that's about it for my decorating.  I did get the foyer done, a little bit in the
kitchen and the nativity in our living room, but not much else.

This year our focus has been on Carter.  Just taking time to enjoy having
a little one in our family at Christmas.  It's something we dreamed of for so long and
something that Michael mentioned every single Christmas until this one.
He always said this was his favorite holiday, but it would be even better with kids.

We took Carter to see Santa this week.
I didn't get to take any good pictures of him, but this is the one
the people at the mall took:

Not his best smile, but at least he wasn't crying!

I tried to find out what Carter wished for, but he and Santa aren't talking.
I'm hoping it was a referral for his sister from China!
We've been thinking of her even more around the holidays
and praying hard for her as always.


Wishing everyone a very merry Christmas!


Linking up with Sunday Snapshot at Ni Hao Y'all.