Let me tell you that I wish I had photos to share of what my childhood Christmases looked like. Our Christmas season started with me whining about when we were going to put up the tree. I love decorating for Christmas and always have and given that our house growing up had been described as it looking like Christmas threw up in there, it's obvious that this is a trait I've inherited.
When it was finally time to put up the tree, it was a big ordeal. Our artificial tree was the kind with color-coded branches that you had to separate and fluff and stick in the appropriate holes. This was also way before the genius of pre-lit trees. If you were around to witness my dad stringing the lights on the tree (which were those big, retro, colorful lights) you'd think he had hated it. Well, maybe he did hate stringing up the lights, but he also hated if it hadn't been done correctly. (This is also why I decorate my tree without Jamie's help. No, that one's too close to one just like it!) Usually during this time, the rest of us were putting out the rest of the decorations that went on shelves, tables and whatever else we could deck with holiday cheer.
Once Dad had used every four-letter-word in his vocabulary (and possibly some he invented) and the lights were up and the tree perfectly fluffed, it was time to decorate the tree. This is where I learned how to "properly" hang the ornaments.
Fundamentals of Christmas Tree Decorating 101
Prof. Sandra L. Stancliff
The basics of Christmas tree decorating as taught from generation to generation. Learn the importance of the order of decorating, spacing and equal placement, as well as how to appropriately place each type and size ornament. Finish the course with a hands-on direction of proper tinsel-hanging.
The glory of a finished tree is something I still awe over today. Decorating for Christmas still gives me that same feeling I had as a kid. Even though Christmas morning isn't the same for an adult (especially of the no-kids-yet variety), I still find that I anticipate it the same, and it all starts with the decorating.
I decorate much earlier than my family did growing up. I get the itch on November 1st, but do my best to hold out until after Thanksgiving. I've shared a bit of my decorating with you in a few past posts here, here and here, but wanted to try and get some better photos. Unfortunately, they might not really be better, but I will share them anyway.
Our tree lives (in the not-so kind of way) in the dining room because we don't have the space for it in the living room.
We have a lot of rails, so I decorate those, too.
The living room houses a couple small trees and our stockings. It also is where you'll find Christmastown in the country of Pianotop.
Christmastown has a brewery.
A couple houses that don't really match scale-wise.
A fire station and another house (which was a hand-me-down).
And the bakery comes from my gram's old Christmas village.
Jamie is in charge of Christmastown; he does a pretty good job.
My favorite part, though, is that you can see the Christmas tree in the dining room from the living room downstairs!
My mom made this for us a while back. It hangs on our wreath and has two more blank stockings for our future expansion.
And this is what Christmas Eve looks like in Orange County right now. Rain and leaves.
So that's not all of my decor, but the main stuffs. I have a fair amount more, but that'd probably get boring. Anyway, we will be spending this evening with some good friends then tomorrow will be spent with Jamie's brothers and their wives.
Merry After Christmas, everyone! We had a great afternoon filled with too many snacks and a delicious dinner hosted by Jamie's youngest brother, Pat, and his wife, Sara. (You'll recognize all these peeps from An Ellison Sibling Thanksgiving.) We snacked, drank wine, open gifts, ate dinner, then sunk into the couch for a bit before making the hour trek back home to Orange County. Wanna see?
As much as I anticipate and love Christmas, I'm always surprised by how ready I am to move on after the big day. We don't turn the lights on as much the week after Christmas, but I still wait until after the new year to start taking it all down. It's so much work and I like to take the week after Christmas to try and get back to normal, then once January first rolls around, I'm really ready to take everything down and pack it away until next year.
How was your holiday? How soon after Christmas are you ready to move on?
It's safe to say I've been lacking the inspiration to really write here, let alone put together some daily posts. At first, I blamed it on being busy with planning our Ping Pong in a Winter Wonderland party, but now that that is over, it's clear that I've just got a major case of blogger's block.
To help me push through, I've been searching for things to write about (to no avail) until I remembered that I used to do "currently" posts! I looked back to find the last one I posted and it was way back in the beginning of August... so, today you get a new "currently" and hopefully I get a new lease on life blogging.
Listening: Since getting our new Jeep, I've been taking advantage of the free year of satellite radio. Particularly the seasonal holiday channels. And when I'm not in the Jeep listening to Christmas music, I'm probably in the house listening to Christmas music on Pandora. Tis the season, yo. My favorites are anything Vince Guaraldi from A Charlie Brown Christmas, Baby It's Cold Outside by anyone except Norah Jones and Willie Nelson, and my most favorite ever, The Drifter's arrangement of White Christmas, which you probably know from Home Alone. Duh.
Watching: Well, I should be watching Christmas movies, but we haven't made a point of it yet. Home Alone is up there on the list for me, so I'm looking forward to watching that hopefully soon. Lately we've just been all up ons our DVR. So much so that we catch up too quickly and have to flip channels for the rest of the night. That's not always bad, though. The other night we landed on Ferris Bueller's Day Off (during which I annoyed Jamie with my line-reciting) and last night we caught the first half of Back to the Future (during which, I also annoyed Jamie with my line-reciting).
Eating: Poorly. Well, I've been eating well if by "well" you mean "really delicious", but poorly if "well" means "healthy". To try and counter this, I've upped my cardio to 5 or 6 times a week, and so far that's working to ward off the holiday 5 that I usually gain.
Thinking: I'm wondering how I'm ever going to learn to budget my time appropriately. I'm a procrastinator in the worst way and it makes for things only getting half finished around the house here. I think I need to start making a list at bedtime of what I need to accomplish the next day, then scratch'em off as I go. I know for a fact that I do better with breaking big things down into smaller bits, so if I can complete just one load of laundry a day until all of the loads are finished, it will be much less overwhelming than trying to do all of the laundry in one day. I need to apply that to probably everything around here, then maybe I'll actually get something done in a timely manner.
Loving: So far, I'm loving the kinda gloomy, rainy-ish weather that we've been intermittently experiencing lately here in SoCal. I'm happy to finally be wearing sweaters, jackets, scarves and boots without feeling silly because it's nearly 80 degrees. I just wish I had more sweaters and jackets and scarves and boots so that I didn't feel like I'm wearing the same outfit everyday.
Anticipating: Ohio! Kind of. Last month, we learned that my mom has breast cancer. Originally, she was to have a lumpectomy, but after some reconsideration, her doctor as recommended a mastectomy. Being that my dad isn't around anymore, my mom's on her own with no one to take care of her, so Jamie and I agreed that I'll be flying out for her surgery and post-op care. So, I'm anticipating spending time with my family and taking care of my mom and her new boobies (which she's looking forward to having!)
Thankful For: I am really grateful that Jamie and I are in a position that I can take time and fly to Ohio somewhat on a whim when I need to. It was really helpful during the 6 years my dad battled his cancer, and it's really helpful now. I definitely didn't want my mom to have to be alone during her healing and not really have any help.
Well, hello there, fellas. I haven't been around much the past couple of weeks due to a hectic schedule of having to do just about everything but blog. It's okay, I'm back now and I'm really excited to share with you guys the photos from our Ping Pong in a Winter Wonderland party!
I don't really know how I got this idea, but I'm glad it came to me because it turned out perfectly. I started planning it probably 5 weeks ago, and quickly began picking up things here and there to decorate with. In the end, I managed to make my garage into a fairly impressive makeshift wonderland of silver sparkles and white snow.
I spent most of Friday decorating and only managed to get half of it finished. Saturday was spent first cleaning the house, then finishing the garage decor, then finally making some grub for our guests. Well, I made a couple small things, but Jamie brined and baked a turkey. Let me tell you, the turkey was probably the best party food idea ever. He cut it up and one of our friends brought over rolls and cheese to make turkey sandwiches.
Jamie also cut up some kielbasa we had in the freezer and made a barbecue sauce for them to live in until they were eaten, which also was delicious. We offered our usual pepperoni dip, which I've been making for probably ten years now. I double the recipe and it's almost always scraped clean. I think my food favorite of the night, though, was this bloomin' onion pullapart bread that I found on Pinterest.
I should have made two!
Most of the food was completely wiped by the end of the night with only a bit of turkey for Jamie and I to have leftover sandwiches yesterday, so I think the food was a success. Now on to the decor! I was so excited when I finally finished the garage that I instantly put it up on Instagram.
The party wasn't officially an ugly sweater party, but I tacked "ugly holiday apparel strongly encouraged" onto the end of the invites and ended up very pleased and entertained with the turnout.
Ella is Jewish so she threw in a light up menorah necklace. I bought her the sippy cup since it was the first night of Hanukkah and all. Chris had pieces of leafy garland stuck onto his sweatshirt. It happened to also be the same garland that I have on my rails in my house.
Jeff's sweater house had real Christmas lights on it! I was also very happy with Alexis' tie and their matching hats.
I found this sweatshirt online (Skip n Whistle) for Jamie. When you see it...
I wish Clare had held her red, Christmas tree purse that she had brought! It really completed her outfit. Tim went for a very classy ugly sweater look. Some thought it was kind of like something a Christmas Leprechaun would wear. Whatever it was, it was fantastic.
Chuck's had this sweater in his closet for 4 or 5 years now and just had to wear it on this occasion.
Misty had the Ping Pong Elf look down perfectly.
Mark's shirt says "My grandkids and I were made for each other!"
Renata beat Jamie in ping pong while wearing an obscured by her hair snowman shirt and Mike was impressed in his ugly Christmas graphic tee.
Chuck was so stoked about all the ping pong!
Sometime before Jamie lost at ping pong.
The final match was Wesley against our reigning champ from Cosmic Ping Pong, Jeff.
Jeff won.
And all the balloons and snow made their way inside the house.
And so the party was a success with just over 30 people showing up! And even though we tracked all of the fake snow from the garage all through the house, the mess really wasn't too bad. Though that probably had to do with Jamie's late-night alcohol-fueled after-party cleaning habit. (Thanks, Husband!)
The Friday after Thanksgiving was the day that I was going to spend all day putting up every piece of Christmas we own. Our tree was a 7 foot pre-lit tree from Target that we bought when we moved into our first apartment back in 2006.
Our first big tree.
Well, I pulled that tree out this year and whaddya know? The bottom third crapped out. This burned my decorating mojo. I was stuck on wanting to decorate the tree, I didn't want to do the rest of the stuff yet. I told Jamie about it and we started looking online at Christmas trees.
I'm sure it was fixable, but trying to find which light went out or what wire was loose was going to be really tedious, so we decided to buy a new tree. Well, that and we kind of wanted a new tree anyway. I've been admiring a lot of the trees that have more realistic branches for some time now, so when we found one in our price range at Home Depot later that evening, we brought it home.
I was really excited about this new tree. Along with having more realistic branches, it also has twigs and berries! (That still makes me giggle.) It also has pine cones, which I think look neat. I got the tree up and started on it right after I poured myself some wine.
Tradition? Last year and this year.
Broken tree and cat. Twigs and berries and pine cones.
Two of my favorite ornaments.
The result.
Our tree hasn't changed a whole lot over the years. I've only added to it. This tree is a little bigger than the old tree, so I did the garlands differently. One of them I was able to string around the tree, but the others I hung vertically down the sides from the top. You can see the beaded one in the picture, but the ribbon is a little out of view, I think you can see a little bit of it on the left side (it's striped).
Aside from being in love with my tree, I'm really excited about this picture. I learned how to make the lights twinkly instead of blobby like in the old photos. I also learned that my tree definitely doesn't look evenly lit in this picture, but oh well! It looks fine in person.
Everything is up around the house now with the exception of the garland and lights for the rail. I ordered new, pre-lit garland to save me some headaches. As you see in my wine picture on the left, I used cheapy green garland and wrapped it, which was a huge pain, then topped it with some metallic leafy garlands, lights, and a few baubles. It always ends up really pretty, but I was ready for a more simple solution.
Once the garland arrives and I get it up, as well as the house picked up and all the boxes are put away, I'll get a new post ready to show it all off. Because I just know you're dying to see it...
And we're back! Happy 2013 errbody. I'm linking up with Shannon for 2013's inaugural So What!
So what!
if Jamie got me an iPad for Christmas and it goes everywhere I go in the house. I might need it! I keep my To Do list on it now so it's handy. (Okay, it doesn't always go with me, but a lot of the time it does.)
So what!
if I have to put givens on my To Do list. Working from home means that I often put off showering. Gross, I know. Yes, I've been home from Spin class for more than 90 minutes. No, I haven't showered yet. Yes, I really need to.
So what!
if the Marsala sauce on my Chicken Marsala was too thick. It was fk'n tasty and a big win that I needed in the cooking department. (Also, so what if my asparagus was floppy. Turns out, our oven wouldn't heat up so I had to cook 'em in a pan instead of roast them like I usually do. They were okay.)
So what!
if I ran out of coffee yesterday. I have all of this fantastic Teavana tea that my mom gave me for Christmas!
So what!
if I ate and drank crap all weekend. (Or more like all of November and December.) (Onion rings from Neighborhood in San Diego! Their logo makes me lol for realz.)
It was all worth it. (Pizza from Basic in San Diego.)
So what!
if it was 40 degrees in San Diego on NYE and I wore nothing warm. And so what if I don't ever recap NYE for yous guys. It involved hitting up our usual spots and lots of food and drinks. See above.
And SO WHAT!
if Down by 311 came on the radio on the drive home from San Diego on New Year's Day and I sang every. single. word. (I worked hard studying those lyrics back in junior high.)
