Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Decorating the house for Christmas


Here are photos from our Holiday kick off weekend.


Here is a quick family shot from Thanksgiving Day. I look odd, but hubby and Ocoee look nice so we are using it.


Mike and Ocoee with Kayla, our family friend and babysitter. We often joke that this is our other family!



Ocoee and I being silly.


Ocoee enjoying some pumpkin ice cream pie...she pretty much loved it. She devoured the crab cakes we made in the place of turkey.


Since it was our first Christmas in Alaska we wanted to go all out on decorating the house. Also Ocoee is much more aware this Christmas than last so we wanted to really make it special for her. We got an amazing 9 foot Fraser Fir that smells so lovely and decorated with some new ornaments, some old and a bow tied by hubby on top.

Every year Ocoee gets a special ornament. Last year it was a silver rattle by Lennox, this year it was a crystal snowflake from Swarovski. 






Ocoee working on decorating her mini tree for her bedroom.




Our tree with the lights on.....sigh. I love Christmas. I wish this website was scratch and sniff so you could smell it!





  
The staircase is wrapped in fresh garland and lights, with the 3 dogger stocking here.

The railing overlooking the living room holds our stockings. Since our old ones were mismatched and worn I bought us all three new ones from Pottery Barn and had our names embroidered on them. They look really nice and will last for years and years!



Hubby did the outside work and used fake garland. In Alaska we have very short days in the winter. We get down to about 5 hours of daylight on the winter solstice so the Christmas lights help to brighten your day and keep your spirits up. This will be our first winter solstice in Alaska since we are usually in Hawaii by the solstice.



Our door wreath. I use a lot of silver in the decorating.


Our new advent calendar from Land of Nod. I filled it with felt ornaments for Ocoee's felt tree. I will post about it later. She is too young for most tiny gifts and candy so the felt ornaments will be a fun way to count down to Christmas.



And the best thing of all from the weekend. The Nebraska Cornhuskers won their game and are heading to the Big Ten Championship this weekend. It was a rough season but we ended it 10-2...not too shabby!



Cheers
J

2 comments:

  1. Your house looks amazing! I LOVE the first picture of Ocoee holding the string of lights - it's my favorite!

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  2. Thanks staci. I tried to get my settings perfect to get the lights and photos. Still had some blur. Convinced I just need a better camera :)

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