Not So Black Friday

At our house, as it was at my house growing up, the day after Thanksgiving is for decorating for Christmas.  I was so excited to decorate this year since it is our first year in our home.  I got to use our big tree and not the Charlie Brown tree we used in the apartment.  We had our friend Mark come put colored lights on our roof line.

Here's the front of the house from the road.  Mark gets those lights in such a straight line.  So nice!

And a closer view of the front window.

We inherited the snowman from Adrian's folks.  He was a bit dusty, but nothing a Magic Eraser couldn't fix.

Bright and shiny!

 

I LOVE our new fireplace!  This was one of the things I was most looking forward to and it came out great!












 I put all of my snowmen on the mantle.  I love snowmen.  I know...  I don't like winter, but I love snowmen.  Going to have to come up with a way to make snowmen that doesn't involve cold weather.

I feel like this needs something else, or something different, but I'm not sure what.  More height differences?  I feel like it's all on one level.  Any ideas?

 Here's our kitchen table and the wall opposite the table. 

I like to switch out our usual art, in this case some coffee prints, for Christmas art. 

And finally, our tree.  It looks so pretty in our front window! 

I really like how the top window afforded me the opportunity to hang the wreath. I used a regular door wreath hanger.  It was skinny enough to fit behind the molding on top of the window, then I just bent it to wrap around the frame and hang next to the window itself.  The wreath is hung backwards so the majority of the lights show from the outside, but you can still see them from inside too.

Here are a few of my favorite ornaments.

Our First Christmas - as a married couple.

Colten's First Christmas - I can't believe it's been 14 years.

Joshua's First Christmas - 10 years on this one.  This ornament is actually a little book that I filled out about what we did and who we saw on Christmas.  Being 3 months old, Josh mostly slept and nursed.  But I'm glad I have the memories in writing.














And our tree topper - Miss Angel.  She's so pretty.

If you look closely at the bottom of the picture of the tree up there, you can see a little bit of white and grey fluff.  I think the kitties are the most excited about this new play structure full of dangling toys.  Thankfully, most of my ornaments are not breakable, so they are ok to swat them around.  They love this dangley jingle bell and the ball hanging at the very right of the this picture.  We've had a couple of crazy chases involving the tree as base.  I put an end to that madness, and now they just stay on the lower branches to play.

 Ack!  They are so stinking cute! Let's be clear...  We are NOT cat people.  We've always had dogs.  We are C.R.A.Z.Y. about Gwennie, our English Bulldog.  We love our friends' dogs and any other dog we happen across.












 But cats?  We tolerated our friends' cats, but never dreamed we be so in love with a cat (or two).  I'm not sure how this has happened.  We still maintain that we are not cat people.  We just happen to be our cats' people.  





So that's our Black Friday tradition.  What about you?  Do you brave the shopping masses or stay home and decorate?  Any crazy critters in your life keeping you on your toes and tugging your heart strings?