Christmas decorating

I stayed home from work again today. I got up ready to go to work, but quickly realized that I was still too weak to deal with jr. high students today. So, I stayed home and rested again today. I will probably still be tired tomorrow, but I think I will be able to make it.

That said, I want to talk about some of our Christmas traditions at my house. I love Christmas decorating. I love the perfect, coordinated Christmas trees, I love the hodge-podge trees that are filled with well loved and cherished heirloom decorations made with finger paint and gold painted macaroni. I love nativity scenes, stars, tinsle, lights, snowmen, glass balls, santas an all the trappings of the decorating.

I have been blessed to have a faily big house so I have the room for quite a number of decorations. The week of Thanksgiving, Jessica said, "Now comes the 4 weeks of not having any room to move because of the decorations." Well, that is true. I usually spend the 2 days after Thanksgiving decorating the house. But the day after, this year, we went to my sister's house and spent the entire day. And the Sat. after, was spent cleaning. So the decorating didn't get done. In fact, I had the boys get it all out into the garage the next weekend and then only did the snowmen in the front room, but only some of them.

Then I decided that I only wanted to do one tree this year. We would put up my tree upstairs, but with the family cherished decorations. The kids were having none of that- they WANTED both trees. And they actually cleaned the basement family room for their tree. So we put up both trees. (I really miss a real tree and the smell of it, but Blue Spruce are the only ones that don't trigger bronchitis like symptoms and they are so darn expensive!)

Then I decided to get out only a couple of the 30 or so nativities that I have collected. But then Matthew asked, "Aren't you going to get out the one that goes on the hall wall? The hall is being neglegted in the decorating." And I kept hearing "what about this, what about that?" over and over. When I said that I thought they would like not having it all out, they were really sad that I wasnt' getting it all out. So we comprimised, I still didn't get it all out, just most of it. So I guess the decorations are more important to the kids than I thought. I thought it was just me.

I'll take some pictures tonight and show you tomorrow.