it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

The Thanksgiving holiday only lasted till Sunday afternoon at our house- lol!! We decided to get out the Christmas decorations, the Christmas music, and got to work. I'm glad we did; we're going to be gone for about a week at Christmas, so this gives us more time to enjoy them. Turns out that Tom will be doing some intensive traveling for the next couple weeks (he left this morning for Texas and will be back next Wednesday), so I'm glad we did it before he left. The camera is on fumes of battery power, and won't re-charge for some reason (it's annoying, too- it's only 5 years old, but it's already practically obsolete), but Tom did manage to take some pictures with it. This also gives you a bit of an idea of what it looks like inside our house!

The pic above is standing at the kitchen island looking towards the family room area. We aren't putting up a full-size tree this year- next year we'll have one (it will be in the Living Room, hopefully next to my piano!) Instead of a large tree, I've always hung ornaments on garland (this is practically cat-proof), so that's what we did again this year.

This pic is standing at the island, looking into the kitchen. I was going to crop out the messy corner of the island, but that would be cheating, a bit, and you wouldn't get an idea of what the room actually looks like. My Santa and snowman collection (the bigger ones, anyway) fit pretty nicely above the cabinets! Grandma's springerle rolling pin hangs above the window over the sink, just like it did in her house.

This table is in the small hallway outside our bedroom. It's a mixture of things from both our collections- Tom's spun glass snow, my bottle brush trees, etc. I've accumulated most of my decorations from antique shops, flea markets, or thrift stores (except for a few special ones from Grandma's collection, or gifts), and most of Tom's came from his Grandma. She gave him a Christmas ornament every year while he was growing up- a nice tradition! My goose feather tree (in the family room, across from the couch next to the TV) and Tom's Nativity set- the tree is decorated with some of the smaller, more fragile glass ornaments, and some of Tom's collection. My favorites are the cotton boll (lower right on the tree) and the gold-painted peanuts(near the top), both of which I remember hanging on Grandma's tree every year.

I hope everyone else is getting into the holiday spirit!!!

(by the way, the weather is turning wintry here- it may freeze tonight!)