Christmas

This is mine and Collin's first Christmas in the same home, and we've actually gotten our decorations up in a fair amount of time before the holiday. I've been working a little too much these past few weeks, so Collin surprised me with a tree this past Saturday afternoon. He said it was the last one in its row at the tree place, and he felt a little bad for it - buying it in the spirit of Charlie Brown Christmas. A very Collin thing to do. I think the sweetest part was the little star he made to top it.


We then moved forward to the actual decorating. We went to the dollar section of Target, of course, to get the extra things we would need besides the 100 ornaments that I had left from Ikea and the after-christmas sale last year. I ended up finding this wonderfully kitsch silver wreath and decided to spice it up a little with some red and green ornaments.



It wasn't hard at all - I just had some leftover floral wire from the wedding, and I wired the ornaments by their little silver fastenings around the skeleton of the wreath. Afterward, we headed to Michael's for some things I call "sprigs," even though I think they probably have a proper name. Anyway, we used said sprigs to stuff into the tree, coming out like branches instead of hanging like ornaments. I had seen Sheri, one of our small group leaders, do this at her home and I thought it made the tree look much more festive.



Finally, since I work at Paper Affair, I decided it would be good practice for married life to send out a mass mailing of Christmas cards, with wedding pictures enclosed. We haven't sent out our thank-you cards from the wedding yet, and I thought this would be a good preliminary "thank you, and yes, we're alive." I bought whatever boxes were on sale at the store and developed some seventy-odd pictures on Walgreens online. I've since sent them all, but my favorite was an Anna Griffin that I'll post a picture of if I can find one. Beautiful.