The halls have been decked

We are slowly but surely moving in the direction of Christmas. Whew. This weekend we hung up the stockings, put out our Christmassy stuff, and even decorated our trees. Well actually Ro and Ree decorated the trees. They hung every single ornament themselves. I just handed out hooks and brought up some festive Christmas music on the AppleTV.

First they decorated our downstairs tree. Little sweeties ooh and ahh every time the lights come on and they sit and just stare at the ornaments. My favorites are the yearly family pic ornaments, and the special decorations we got in China, and their faves are the plaster ornaments that they painted themselves when they were little.

Then they decorated their bedroom trees. We picked up some fiber optic white trees last year at Target and they love using them as nightlights during the holidays. If you look closely, you can see that Ro (in pink) was enamored with sorting her ornaments and hanging them by type. See the hilarious clustered groups of ornaments that are only at the very bottom of her tree? Hee! Ree (in blue) went for even tree coverage and careful even spacing of ornaments. Love both trees and just loved their comments like “Ooooo, this one is beeyooootiful” and “Wow, look mama, this one is the sparkliest” during the decorating.

(I made this collage clickable to a larger version, in case anyone’s dying to see the details. You can see a tiny bit of the girls’ new pink room and big-girl beds in the bottom right photo, I need to take more house pics soon.)

Alrighty, I think we’re getting there. The only decoratey-type thing that’s left (I think) is the hanging of the outside lights, and that’s kind of TubaDad’s area. Oh, and for the presents, I found the BEST new hiding place. All of Ro and Ree’s gifts have been secreted away in the refrigerator-sized tuba-shipping case in the garage. Mwah ha ha!!

PS: If you still haven’t done your Christmas cards and are panicking (like I was), check out Prints Made Easy. We’ve used them many times before for seasonal postcard mailings and used them for the first time this year to make Christmas postcards. They print large, beautiful postcards (5.5” x 8.5”) that you design (you can get super fancy and create intricate graphics for both sides, or just upload a snapshot for the front like I did) and then they will mail them for you to the addresses you supply in an Excel sheet. They’re fast, I put in our addresses on 12/6, and our fab Christmas postcards were printed, stamped, and delivered to the post office on 12/9.