I love that Christmas decorating doesn’t have to be complicated, time-consuming, or expensive to be really pretty and festive.  It really can be as simple as trimming a few branches from evergreens and tucking them around the house.  We have some nice bushes and trees in our area that are perfect to clip and take inside during the holidays.  We have cypress, pine, a bush that has needles that look like rosemary, our neighbor has a magnolia bush I have permission to borrow from, and I was even eyeing some beautiful juniper bushes with blue berries in the Walmart parking lot!  But this year, I just dove into the bin of artificial greens I moved with us from MN.  In our PA house, we didn’t have any artificial greens at all.  We had hot water radiators, so our heat wasn’t as dry as the electric heat we had in our

When I was in high school, we moved into a newly-built house the day after Christmas.  It was a little strange, but it felt like a part of Christmas.  My new room was the best gift of the year and a place to put my new clothes and CD player.  We moved into this house in mid-September, but it feels like we just moved in.  We’re still getting organized and settled.  There are still so many projects to do, a few boxes to unpack, and things to be organized.  The Christmas season, while welcome, feels like a bit of a disruption.  On top of stripping wallpaper and painting trim, I need to put up and decorate a tree, buy and wrap gifts, and do advent stockings (Calvin sent me a text this morning reminding me of that!) It’s exciting and my favorite time of year, but it feels a little