I have a confession to make....

.... I hate decorating for Christmas! There, I said it!

I love, love, love decorating for fall. But, I just dread decorating for Christmas every year. I have often said that if we didn't have kids I wouldn't even put up a tree. In fact, when Kyndal was a baby my girlfriend from law school drove the 1+ hours to my house and decorated my tree just so I would have one up.

When we built our house a couple of years ago, we built a large floored storage room upstairs where I store my decorated Christmas tree every year. We just (carefully) haul it down the stairs, fluff it and voila! I'm totally bummed this year because we have at least two strands of lights that are burned out and I am going to have to take off all of the decorations, relight it and redecorate it this year. Yuck.


Just call me Scrooge ... bah humbug!

Don't you wish you were one of my kids? Actually, I love Christmas after the decorations are up. I love celebrating Feliz Navidad with Rick's sister's family on Christmas Eve (we only call it that because we eat Mexican food). I love staying up late on Christmas Eve with my husband wrapping all of the kids' gifts. I love getting up at the crack of dawn when the first kid awakens! I love watching my kids open their gifts. I love the mess! I love sitting with my husband in our pjs when it's all over. I love cooking biscuits and gravy and cinnamon rolls. I love my family coming and spending the day. I love the tradition of sitting in a circle opening our gifts one at a time, going from youngest to oldest. I love cooking that traditional turkey dinner and pumpkin pie. I love it all. I just hate decorating for it!

Maybe it's because my decorations start out looking like this....


Now, I love, love, love the way the house looks once it's decorated! The reds, greens and golds all match our home decor perfectly and it all just blends together so well! I just hate the tediousness of getting it all out! (And thank goodness that Rick loves to organize, so he's the one to take them down and store them away every year when me and the kids go to my parents' the week after Christmas.)

So that's what I am doing all day today. I'm going to get the inside of the house decorated. Then the kids and I are going to decorate cookies tonight.

I'll get the tree undecorated today, but we'll concentrate on decorating it tomorrow after we get back from a visit to Santa at Bass Pro Shop.

Last night we made a countdown chain and hung it in the kitchen. Notice the blue ring. That's Eli's birthday. I figured we'd throw that one in also to help him see visually when his birthday will be here.


I'll have to get the outside decorations up sometime this week. Of course I waited until it was frigid cold!

So, now I'm off to get changed and get started.