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Saturday, December 22, 2007

My Decorations







This year I placed all my photo Christmas cards on my mantle. Some of the families are people that I see on a weekly basis, others are family, some are people I see only see once a year, many are people that moved away, but all are people that I love keeping in contact with. I love getting to see how all the kiddos grow from year to year. I keep all of my Christmas cards and scrapbook them in our Christmas album (I know that sounds pretty adventurous, but I'm only about 4 years behind-I should say my plan is to scrapbook all of them). We received more cards this year than ever! I think we have 35 now. I love racing to the mailbox in December to see which ones have arrived. My friend Stacey (who now lives in Arkadelphia) is always the first Christmas card to arrive. I know I can always count on that. I saw an idea on another blog that I may try next year. This girl bought a small Christmas tree and barely put any decorations on it. Then when her cards would arrive, she would punch a small hole in them, string some ribbon through and use her cards as the ornaments for that tree. I'm going to look for a small to medium size tree to do that!!!

Luke has his own tree in his room. It's a 6 foot tree that I rescued from my neighbor's trash. I know what you all are thinking...that I'm a Dumpster Diver-ha! But my neighbors were military and moving again and they were chunking all kinds of cool things. I don't know why she didn't take it to Goodwill or call someone to pick it up, but anyway...she was wasteful and I got a nice tree because of it. Luke has lots of colorful handpainted ornaments that Randie and I worked on about 10 years ago. He also gets a new ornament every year that kinda represents what he likes at the time (when he was two it was Mufasa and Simba, last year was Superman and this year it's Yoda). He also has lots of photo ornaments and handmade goodies. He likes having his own tree. FYI-don't let the Christmas tree cord get too close to your guinea pig cage. I promise they will chew through it! I don't know how one of them didn't die, because the lights were on when they started nibbling. I would have puked if I would have walked in there and seen a fried pig in that cage! But I learned how to splice wires this year-all from help from my mom and electrician brother-in-law Bryan. This could be dangerous!

Next are pics of my Dept. 56 Snow Villages. I have eight total. Most of them were gifts from family (especially April). I have Grandma's cottage, Garage Sale (my friend Julie said only I would have a garage sale in my Christmas Village. Ha! I took her to her first garage sales last year and she loved it!!!), Public Library (to represent my love of libraries and books-I know...I'm a nerd), All Saint's Church, Fishing Cabin, Christmas Store, Hunting Lodge (Eric dropped this one out of the attic about 8 years ago-I cried so hard! But I salvaged it and I just put lots of little trees next to the big hole in the side of it!) and the Ice Castle. We all love looking at them all lit up at night.

The last picture is of our tree. I bought the green ribbon at Holiday House a few years back and really like the color. We have a variety of ornaments. Eric and I used to exchange ornaments every year (I'm not quite sure why we stopped...maybe we were getting too many). Some of my favorites are my Hallmark ornaments. I have several Scarlet O'Hara ornaments, Baby's 1st Christmas, Our First Christmas Together, Our New Home, Luke's Growth Chart Ornament, etc. Eric said our tree is prettiest it has ever been! I love it!

Merry Christmas from our home!
Amy, Eric and Luke

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