Christmas Preparations

Every Advent I tell myself that this year I'm not going to go crazy with the Christmas decorations until closer to Christmas, you know, building up the anticipation and all.  I have this dream of trimming the tree on Christmas Eve while the children are sleeping so that when they wake up on Christmas morning they have that Yours, Mine and Ours moment of peeping over the banister (in my dream, along with more holiday patience we also have a second floor with a very grand staircase), seeing the tree all decked out and yelling "he's been here, he's been here, Santa Clause has been here!" while waking up the rest of the house to join in on all the merrymaking.

We'd also all sing carols around the piano but that's a whole other dream involving actually owning a piano, knowing how to play it, and also.......how to sing. 

Well, this is not the year for my holiday dreams to come true.  I mostly blame Pinterest. And the fact that I really like our tree and all of our special ornaments......

We've been adding a family picture ornament each year and it's really fun to look at them all and wonder how we were ever so young......

.....case in point.....how old are we here--fifteen?  Just look at my husband's baby face!

We really don't have much in the way of other decorations.  I've been paring them down to things that have some actual sentimental value and are worth moving every two years and also we don't have a ton of extra space for display.  Really though, no matter where you are in our house you are only three steps away from being able to see the Christmas tree, so the other rooms don't need decorating, right?  :)

I did get a little fancy with my cardboard though, and a bunch of scrap tree branches we picked up when we bought our tree.

I think I'm most excited with the jingle bell garland I made a la Pottery Barn.  Since we don't have a mantle, I strung it across the window, as per usual.  One perk to waiting to decorate is that you find crazy deals on Christmas decorations at all the stores--my jingle bells and ribbon were already on clearance two weeks before Christmas.  At those prices, I let the boys each pick out an ornament too and I also may have grabbed a little raccoon ornament to which Chris replied, upon seeing it on the tree, "I'm never going to live it down and I?"  No, no sweetheart, you're not :)

In other Christmas news, I attempted a second photo shoot of the boys for this year's ornament (the first shoot for our Christmas cards did not yield any pictures of all three children looking pleasantly in the same general direction--so if you're on our Christmas card list be on the look out for another awkward Reintjes' family photo--you. are. welcome.)

This time this was the winner:



I'll just let you imagine what the rest must have looked like.....at least  no one was crying this year!

For some reason this one just won't sit still to have his picture taken.

And in other, even more exciting Christmas news, grandma Reintjes shamed Chris into putting up our Christmas lights even though he didn't want to because this year the base is charging us for electricity if we use more of it than four of our neighbors do (don't ask, it's complicated--and also annoying).  On the positive side, once our neighbors saw that we put up our lights, they all put theirs up too--probably because they know their energy usage will most definitely be safely below ours.  Oh well, it's almost Christmas and the house is most definitely cheerful, if not super Advent-y!

Don't the icicle lights really set off our palm tree?

Now, I really need to go work on addressing those cards....and guarding the tree from the baby......and maybe next year I'll have that staircase and piano and all my Christmas dreams will finally come true......

And on a completely different note, Chris is going in for surgery this Thursday to repair a hernia so please send your prayers our way!