Now It's Christmas Time

I know we just had Thanksgiving, but apparently, we've left Fall and are now in the grips of Winter's icy, deathly fingertips of doom, ice, snow, sleet, wetness, cold, horror, overeating and shame. Just me?

Yesterday Zach and I did ALL THINGS CHRISTMAS:

We mailed out the Christmas cards.
Bought a real live Christmas tree.
Decorated the house with tons of awesome Christmas stuff that my lovely Aunt Marybeth and my awesome Grandma gave us.
Listened to Christmas music.
Sat in the dark and admired all the pretty lights.
Hated the snow (oh, wait, that was just me).

Anyway, here's a photo essay of our endeavours. The pictures just really don't do it justice. I swear it's super beautiful and so nice in the house now. It's all decorated and it looks like an actual family lives there. It's official.

This is our Welcome sign. It hangs, very handily, on the peephole of our door. Fantastic and easy.


This is the Christmas tree. As you can see, we used a net to capture it in the wild. It was hard, but if you have two people, it's a lot easier. Zach stood on one side and I stood on the other and we held the net taught and then when the Christmas trees were running by, we jumped one and caught it.

Even though we caught our our tree by ourselves, the man at the Christmas tree ranch said we had to pay for it. This is Zach being excited by the price:


In case you didn't catch that he's happy because it's a $27.00 tree:
It's a Scotch Pine. I'm pretty sure there are some stereotypes about Scottish people and being cheap or what have you. I will let you put in your own joke here. Enjoy.

This is the most delicate part of the tree trimming - getting the skirt on the tree.

Now that the tree is dressed, it looks awesome:


More tree because it's super pretty, but hard to capture. Also notice how nice our plants look on their new table and plant stands. Going to my Aunt's house is like mining for gold. Or getting handed gold without all that pesky shifting and digging.


We tried to capture the feel of the lights, and by we, I mean, Zach:


This is a picture of our super cute holiday village in which I placed some snowmen. I like to think of the snowmen as the villagers, hanging out, buying some antiques, visiting the crazy sequined tree on the outskirts of town:


Here's a close-up version of the village with a snowman in the foreground. It's a pretty arty pic. That's how Zach is though. I don't even want to tell you how many different versions of the same picture I had to sort through.

One side of the tv/entertainment area:


The other side:


A shelf in the bookcase, which holds movies, not books, but I digress:


These pictures don't even really do it justice. Just trust me that our house is super beautiful. SUPER! I think that Zach finished the outside decorations today, so I'll get him to take one billion photos of that which I will then have to narrow down to a few so that I can post them here. I kid, I love that Zach takes pictures for me because I hate doing it by myself.

I leave you with this awesome artistic piece.

Happy Holiday Season!