TiS ThE SeAsON!

One of my favorite decorations...One of my favorite Christmas Songs...It Came Upon A Midnight Clear

Had a wonderful Thanksgiving....hope that you did too. JB and I took in some black Friday shopping, after 2:30 pm and got home around 11:30 pm. Considering we had bought NOTHING for Christmas, we did pretty well. Early Saturday morning, my good, sweet friend Paula over at Broken Y and I took off around 7:30 am and headed to Harper KS for a little shopping at a little place that fellow bloggers(Jenn and Michelle) opened. It was so fun to take a little road trip, visit, and get to meet these fellow bloggers and Shop! Got home from there, headed home to begin the task of decorating for Christmas. It's always a job to drag out my tubs of stuff from the crawl space, CB was a good boy and helped me get everything out and discovered a dead mouse in the process(boo~hiss). I proceed to crawl down there and get a few other things and discover a very wet floor, carpet, etc. Oh great, we have some sort of a leak and it's been leaking awhile...can you say Mold? Gross. Any whoo....JB crawls down, starts cutting out the wet carpet, etc and scraping the mold off...in the drying process now so we can go back with bleach. Still haven't figured out what exactly is leaking or has leaked. My question is....Why must darn near everything turn into a home improvement project?

Here's a little play by play on my assembling & decorating of the tree

First, all boxes must be drug out of crawl space and trash the living room :) Then assembly begins, all my branches are coded by Alphas...

As each layer of branches go on, so do a string of lights, almost always white, once in awhile, colored. I use about 600 lights.

This year, I decided to try a little raffia in the tree for something a little different. I like my new different...will add this new routine in for every year!

Finally, the finished product...lots and lots of ornaments! I love looking at all of them as I put them on, the boys made some, some are gifts, some were wedding presents, the boys always get ornaments from Grandpa every year(since they were born). Some are fun, some are silly and some are very sweet and special. One of my very favorite things to do this time of year is have a seat in the living room, all lights off but the tree and sit and meditate, savor and enjoy the peaceful feeling that it brings. Better yet, early morning is good too....sipping my coffee and enjoying my tree!

And now, I'm going to share a few of my favorite ornaments

The beautiful, purple KState glass ball.

This belongs to one of the boys...they each have one, Grandpa got this for them! GO CATS!

This was a gift from last year to the family...It's pretty special.

These are just a FEW of my favorites. What are your favorite ornaments?

Have a blessed week as we head into the CHRISTmas season.