Christmas Tour

It’s that time again, can you believe it?  There are parties all over the blogosphere this week.  Boomama is once again hosting her Christmas Tour of Homes.  And Kimba is having a Holiday Open House.  And I’m never one to miss a party, so please, won’t you come in!

This is what the outside of my house looked like last year, and it would look that way this year except a big bad wind came through and blew my wreath right off my garage.  That was a week ago, but do you think we’ve taken the time to drag out the extension ladder and hang it back up?  (And by we I do mean my husband.)  So anyway, here is last year’s picture for you.

This year I have done the bare minimum with holiday decorating, so there’s not as much to see as there has been in years past.  For instance, I didn’t bother delving into the millionty-two boxes of Department 56 village houses that reside in my attic.  We are traveling to my parents’ home in Virginia for the holidays, and I’m not hosting any holiday events this year (with the notable exception of this VIP bloggy Tour of Homes of course) so we did the cost/benefit analysis and decided against the lighted villages this year.

I rather miss them, but I did not miss the angst of setting them all up.  And I surely won’t miss the chore of taking them all down.  But we do have one very gorgeous and very large tree and some other decorative touches here and there.  So without further ado, let’s start the tour!

Behold… the front door complete with a live wreath sent by Flora2000.com.  I love this wreath.  So fresh and pretty, and I love how they assembled the greens so that it’s not perfectly proportioned.  It’s just so natural and homey.

When you enter my foyer you will be greeted by this lighted garland on my staircase.   This is the first year I’ve done this, and for $21 at Target, it’s a lot of bang for the buck.  I’m not sure why it took me so long to make the leap.  It does give me a bit of angst that the greens aren’t real, but a friend warned me that using live greens can leave sap on the railing, so I went with the faux version.  It works.

Turn to the right, and that’s our living room.  I love the vaulted ceiling in our living room, and we set out to get a tree that does it justice.  It’s still not as tall as I’d have liked, but since the room itself isn’t very large, we were afraid if we went any bigger, there would be no room for anyone or anything BUT the tree.

Our tree doesn’t really have a theme.  It’s basically a potpourri of ornaments — some are handmade by my husband’s father (he makes ornaments every year for every family member — so cool!), some were passed down from my childhood, some are gifts we’ve bought for our children through the years, some are souvenirs from vacations, and some are collectibles I’ve picked up as I’ve seen them.  Some years we do two trees, and then I separate the colorful painted ornaments from the fancy ones.  But this year, in our efforts to keep things simple, we combined everything on one tree.  The cranberry garland is a fixture on our family tree.  I’ve used it since our very first Christmas, and I just keep buying more as our tree has grown over the years.  And I picked up that tree skirt on an after-Christmas sale last year at Crate and Barrel.  LOVE the tree skirt.

Moving into the family room, I put a festive garland on the mantle.  I had great plans of making a fancy-schmancy garland that I saw over at The Nesting Place but unfortunately that never came to fruition.  The stockings are hung by the chimney with care, as you can see — one for each of our three children.

And on the wall to the right of the mantle, I put some of our Christmassy tchotchkes that we’ve been given over the years.

I set out some coffee and Christmas cookies in the kitchen.  Would you like some?  These are my Christmas dishes which we use every day between Thanksgiving and New Years.  And those cookies are my husband’s super secret family recipe.  What?  You’re trying to bribe me?  Oh you are sly.  Okay, I’ll divulge.  But only for you.  Here it is. Just don’t tell anyone I told you, mmm’kay?  And if you come back tomorrow, I have a little vlog I plan to post with some footage from our cookie making fiesta yesterday.

Well, take a cookie for the road, and I sure hope you’ll come back again.  In addition to my daily musings about everything but the kitchen sink, I host weekly giveaways here on Musings of a Housewife, so be sure to subscribe to my blog so you don’t miss any of the fun!  For example, right now I’m giving away a Clarisonic Skin Care System, retail value $195.  And I also have two giveaways going on right now at my review blog, so stop on over to Reviewsings.com and register for your chance to win a Pulsonic power toothbrush by Oral B and a $30 gift card to The Children’s Place.  Good luck!

You can also find me twittering away the day under the handle dcrmom.  (For those of you who might not know, dcrmom harkens back to the days that I didn’t use my real name.  D, C, and R are the first initials of my children’s names, and of course I am their mom.  So, that’s how I came up with dcrmom.  It’s amazing how many of my real life friends get stumped by that.)

For more Christmas home tours, visit Boomama and link up!  And be sure to leave me a comment so I know you stopped by.