Decking Our Halls

The Christmas season is here ... and Kyle and I worked hard to get the house ready last weekend.

We finally have a fireplace to hang our stockings!

I also had to put up my absolute favorite Christmas decoration - the Beary Merry Christmas calendar. My mom made it when we were little ... you move the bear around the house each day as he looks for Christmas. My big brother, Jeff, used to tease me by moving the bear to the chimney every day, and his legacy lives on as Kyle does the same thing. I'll never win.

Here I am "layering" as Lisa, Jenny and I were taught by a professional decorator while I was back in Cleveland. We went to a class and now I'm motivated to go a little bigger for Christmas ... but I'll wait until our next house before I buy more decorations.

Our annual tradition is to make the trek to a Christmas tree farm, cut down our own tree and enjoy the hot chocolate to kick off the season. That is apparently not the tradition of most Northwest Arkansans as there were no Christmas tree farms within a 2-hour drive from our house! We were not about to give in and skip having a live tree … so we did the next best thing … picked one up at Lowe’s.

Lame, I know. But we love the look, smell and nostalgia of a live tree for the holidays, and we weren’t about to let Arkansas stop us. Here's the winner.

Here's Kyle doing all the work again. Don't these pictures remind you of the Halloween posting when he had to haul the pumpkins to the car?!?! I've got a good thing going, I know.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but for some reason, the process of getting the tree in the house and set up in the stand is much easier these days then when I was growing up. I remember it taking forever with a lot of screaming going on; “Hold the damn tree!” “That’s not straight!” It tended to get a little intense. Now, Kyle just throws that tree into the stand, I pretend to hold it (which really doesn’t matter cause he’s doing most of the work anyway) and we get it positioned perfectly within minutes.

We played Christmas music, hung the lights and ornaments (of which 5 are “Our First Christmas” ornaments) and even baked some cookies to finish off the festivities.

Here's one of my favorite ornaments ... everyone has to have a little "Grandpa's Cheesebarn" hanging on their tree! For those of you that aren't familiar, your loss. It's an amazing place halfway between Cleveland and Columbus ... a family tradition to stop and buy cheese and sausage.

Kyle is sweet to humor me in all the cheesy holiday activities, but while he probably won’t admit it to you, I think he really enjoys this stuff just as much as I do! While it won’t be any time soon (seriously, Moms, don’t ask,) we are both looking forward to having kids so that we actually have an excuse to do all this holiday stuff!