Ellison Sibling Christmas Oh-Twelve

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?

Obligatory Christmas Tree Picture

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...