These are the words that I kept uttering to my father, over the weekend. Growing up, we had our artificial tree that my sister and I would look forward to decorating. We also had some really nice decorations that we adorned the annual Christmas tree. However, since my parents became empty-nesters, Christmas does not come to the old homestead in Marlboro, NJ. I think my parents depended on us kids to get the tree up and decorated and taken back down again and stored away. I think my Mom still takes out some minor holiday decorations around the house but barely noticeable - in fact, for all I know, they might just stay up year round.
This past weekend, I spent the time getting ready for the holidays. I feel like I'm behind on the holiday spirit. A large part of that might be because I spent Thanksgiving in a foreign country and was not able to be a part of the craziness known as Black Friday. As I hang my head down in shame, I will tell you that I have been a part of those crazy 6 am (I don't go any earlier than that) lines at Best Buy. If I'm up in New Jersey for Black Friday, my sister will inevitably drag me to Kohl's and I will inevitably buy some nonsense not on my holiday list.
So our "getting ready for the holidays" weekend included buying a live tree (our first), ornament shopping for the tree and decorating it. We have a mini tree we display on a table with all our collected ornaments from the past ten years but in our first house, we wanted to start it with a live tree and new ornaments to signify a first for everything. Crate and Barrel assisted with the ornaments while Michael's offered my tree top ribbon and bows.
One of the best purchases I think I ever made was my Bow Maker. I made all the pew bows for my wedding so I still had it stashed away somewhere. There was no way I was going to pay $36 for a pre-made bow at Michael's when I could do it myself in 10 mins with $5 worth of ribbon. And I have to say, it came out lovely. I was so excited about decorating the tree that even my Dad's constant pacing and wondering 'why the heck we were going through so much trouble for 'didn't even irk me.
When completed, the tree was simple, yet elegant with clear white lights and a theme of red, gold and clear/silver/white. I was so happy with the results. Even my Dad was impressed and quickly broke out his camera to take pictures of the finished product to show my Mom what she was missing. My Dad even ran up to his room to change shirts so he'd look nice next to the tree....even though the tree still showed him up.
Nevertheless, I had such a great time decorating and getting into the holiday spirit that I started doing my online shopping this morning...I can hardly believe it's already December and Christmas is a short 3.5 weeks away.
Happy Holidays!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment