The halls are finally decked

Sometimes I think it would be nice if I were to wake up on December 1st and find that elves have put up all my Christmas decorations.  I love Christmas but putting everything out in preparation for it can be a little overwhelming and messy.  This year we had a busy first week of December and couldn’t get around to anything until that weekend.  So on Friday night after no less than 57 requests from Jax, we finally started decorating for Christmas.  Carl dragged our trees out from the garage and used the yard blower to clean off all the cobwebs, dead bugs and dirt from the boughs.  Then began the task of trying to rearrange the furniture so that the trees looked like parts of the room instead of getting smooshed into a corner.  It wasn’t easy and by the time we finally had it figured out I was a little frazzled.  Honestly, I wasn’t all that excited to set up Christmas with our worn out couches, scratched up walls and mismatched, half broken decorations.  I wanted cute, cozy cottage Christmas.  Not beat up, randomly scattered, frat house Christmas.

It was getting late, the kids were driving me crazy and I was ready to give up for the night.  Jax had disappeared at some point during the furniture shuffle so I went to find him.  Already grumpy and being the jerk that I am, I marched out with my bad attitude ready to bust him in the act of doing something naughty.  I thought, “He’s probably upstairs playing ipad and eating my secret stash of  Flips from my night stand.”  I rounded the corner and stopped in my tracks.  Every single decoration we owned (broken or otherwise) was unpacked and strung about the living room.  It was a disaster.  Just as I was about to exclaim, “What the @$%*?!”  I saw Jax.  There he was in the middle of it all, carefully and quietly hanging ornaments on the trees we’d set up.  Bless his heart, he’d been waiting for so long to decorate the tree he just couldn’t stand it any longer.  While I was steaming over the feng shui of our family room and our less than Better Homes and Gardens decor Jax was singing Jingle Bells and rediscovering all his favorite and familiar nicknacks.  If ever I needed to be chastised it was now.  I was schooled.  I had to bite my lip when he turned around to show me his work.  Smiling ear to ear.  What a tender heart.  He wasn’t bothered by decoration protocol, “Lights first, Jax.  Then decorations.”  He didn’t care if the tree bobbles weren’t coordinating with my couches.  He just wanted to invite Christmas into our home.  And to do that you have to decorate a Christmas tree.  Plain and simple.

{Jax and Milo}

I gave myself a time out for being such a brat.  I tucked the kids in bed for the night.  I read them extra chapters in our book. And I gave each of them a Merry Christmas kiss goodnight.  “Tomorrow,” I promised, “I will be better.”

The next morning I woke up with a better attitude, made breakfast for everyone and we all set to work once again putting our house in Christmas order.   But we soon realized that unless you counted the pile of shards at the bottom of the decorations box (looks like I didn’t do a very good job of packing it up last year) we really didn’t have much to put on the trees.  And our lights had pretty much had it too.   So we took a family trip to Walmart and picked out several boxes of “shatter proof” balls and lights.  We came home and decorated all the trees with Jax heading up the project.  Crew and Milo showed us their dance moves to Pandora Christmas music.   Carl made hot chocolate for everyone.  We even ate, I mean strung a little popcorn while watching football.  I make this day sound all warm and fuzzy because, well, it was!   When the day was done we went from this:

to this:

My favorite part is turning off all the overhead lights so the tree lights can sparkle in all their soft glowing glory.  Makes me want to snuggle up in a fuzzy blanket and watch A Muppets Christmas Carol.  I walked around the house and declaring, “Oh, our house is so pretty!”  It’s not Pottery Barn perfect, it’s our “we have little boys and we’re still growing” perfect and I really do love it.

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