I’ve been delinquent with respect to the blog lately. It’s not that I haven’t been thinking about it; I’ve been taking pictures with the intention of posting them on the blog, but when it comes to uploading and sizing, I’m not too motivated.
Today, I finally got around to taking down our last piece of Christmas decor: our front door wreath. Most of it has been down for a while now, but I guess since we tend to go in and out via the garage, there wasn’t a visible reminder that we needed to do something about it.
To console myself over the fact that we won’t be enjoying Christmas lights for a while now, I’m going to recap how we made our house a little festive last year.
First, the dining room. We spread a silver and gold accented table cloth on the table, with some burgundy and gold napkins in the center. On top of that we filled a decorative glass bowl with cinnamon-scented pine cones and some metallic ornaments. We finished off the table with a grouping of candles on either side of the center piece.
On the buffet, we displayed a nativity set given to us by Steve’s parents.
I used an inverted stemmed hurricane to elevate the heavenly host up above the holy family and its visitors.
Also, you’ll notice a couple of copies of O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” next to the visiting wise men.
I was given a copy by a friend when I was in college. I actually hadn’t heard the story before, but I had listened to a record of “Christmas Eve on Sesame Street” over and over and over again when I was a kid. Bert and Ernie’s gift situation was suspiciously like the one in the O. Henry story. Every Christmas since then I’ve searched for copies, since I thought it was a great gift. I was never able to find it, though. Until 2008. A bookstore near my work was closing up shop at the end of the year, and would you know it, they had several different versions on super duper clearance! I snatched one up and gave it to Steve that year. In hindsight, I should have purchase several more copies.
We also scattered some metallic Christmas trees, some of which I had collected and some of which I borrowed from my mother, around the manger scene, with more groupings of candles, of course.
Things were a little bit more casual and bright in our family room. We decked out the fireplace mantle with Christmas stuff.
The stockings were inexpensive, plain felt stockings which I dressed up just a bit with an iron-on initial for each of us.
 |
 |
I also swagged a piece of festive ribbon between the two stocking holders to add a few glass ornaments to the display. We scattered some Christmas items we’d collected over the years in with our usual mantle decor. My favorite is the pair of kissing dogs, which was a gift we received when we got engaged, just before the previous Christmas.
In case you were looking for pictures of our Christmas tree, you can stop. We didn’t have one. We found an artificial tree at Costco that we liked, but waited to long to buy it and they ran out. We then decided we could do without for this year and wait for after-Christmas sales to purchase a tree. That idea was a bust because as far as I could tell, most retailers were clearing out their Christmas stuff about 2 weeks before Christmas to make way for Valentine’s Day merchandise. So next year we will be looking for a tree early.
Now that I think about it, this post is probably a lot more timely than I thought at first, since it’s probably about time for retailers to start putting out Christmas stuff for next year. I mean, it’s almost February, so they better get on it or Christmas will pass them right by.
© 2010 The Beehive All Rights Reserved