It's the Holiday season!

CHRISTMAS!
it's so close!
I am a girl of tradition and Christmas is one of the times that I get upset if tradition is not kept. This year is special because although Chris and I have been together on Christmas before, this is the first year that we have a home together and so NEW TRADITIONS. Which is pretty fun. Christopher and I can mold our family traditions and also come up with some new traditions.

 December first meant that we could start the Christmas season and so we set out to cut down our first tree together. For me this has been an activity my family has been doing for years, but for Chris not so much. He always had either an artificial tree or his dad went out on their property and cut one down, so the farm experience was new. It was pretty fun, almost a treasure hunt of course to find the perfect tree. We wanted a Douglas fir because we read that they last the longest. The workers on the farm told us that all of the varieties of trees were intermingled and so they gave us a small sample branch of what we were looking for and we were off! It was fun searching for the right type of tree and the right size. We were looking for a tree around 6.5 feet and we ended up with at least a nine foot tree that just brushes the top of our ceiling. PERFECT. Thankfully my mom had found a tree stand for us at a resale shop for five dollars. Apparently they don't make the old fashioned stands anywhere anymore and now they have big plastic bulky things that just are odd.

Once we stood the tree up and FINALLY straightened it out, we had to trim a few branches off of the bottom and arrange our new tree skirt around the base of the stand.  I then sat and fashioned a sad looking wreath from the leftover branches. It looks great on our  front door, definitely looks handmade. Chris strung the lights around the tree, of course he did it wrong and I had to redo it but it's the thought that counts. ;) We then hung our knit stockings from the mantle and sat down feeling happy. Our home becomes more homey every time we add something new to it, even if it's as little as a doormat, and now that it's Christmas it's just so cozy in here!

Now we had to do some shopping to do to because, although you may not realize it until you have Christmas on your own for the first time, you don't have any ornaments. And of course I wanted those sentimental ornaments that you put on the tree each year and remember where  or whom you received it from and for what reason or how old you were when you made it. Well with the first year, I guess you don't really have that. I tried to make some ornaments with my siblings and we also had cut a section off of the trunk of our tree in order to create an ornament. We bought a lot of our ornaments from "re-use" stores and actually sat down one night and strung garland from popcorn and cranberries, surely a new tradition for us. We stocked up on ornaments and hung them in order to make our tree glisten. Only a few things were missing that we were still hunting for; a nativity scene and an angel for the top of our tree. I finally found the perfect angel after rejecting a few light up, furry, and/or scary looking toppers. And the same day my mom texted me to say she found a nativity scene and it was in the mail. It is exactly what I was looking for, sometimes I think my mom and I are on the same wave length. It looks a lot like the manger scene we had growing up. So we are now all set for Christmas. We even managed to find a little mistletoe!

Chris and I have decided that Christmas is very important to us, and we love celebrating more than presents. So a lot of the gifts under the tree will be things like, a new bath mat for the bathroom! or a warm pair of socks! or practical gifts and the like. Christmas is not all about gifts, its about Jesus, family, and traditions and it's important to keep that in mind.