still decorating

We bought a few new things for the yard last weekend. Braden picked out the purple penguin and Ashlyn picked out the giant ornament. She surprised us with that one. They had a Santa and a Snowman but she went with the ornament.

Traditions

Every family has traditions. One of our traditions came to be because I insisted that we have plain matching stockings. Mike hates them. So to compromise, a few years ago we started buying a new ornament to hang on our stocking to make them more personal.

We bought this year's ornaments at Old Town Pottery (one of my all time favorite stores!) over the weekend. Ashlyn picked out several ornaments before she finally settled on the glass angel.

She did demand a new stocking this year. I bought these 4 stockings when she was just a baby. Braden decided which color went each person. Ashlyn has had the green stocking the past 3 years but she was not happy this year when I unpacked it. She threw it down and demanded a pink one. Since we didn't have a pink one she settled with the white.
Mike hasn't changed his ornament in several years. He likes his charger Santa so he's been hanging on to it.

I picked out a new clay Santa. I like clay Santa ornaments. The first year Mike and I were married we had no ornaments and no money. I found some packs of ornaments at a dollar store and that's where the collection began. I try to pick up a few every year and of course I always pick out a clay Santa for my stocking ornament every year.

As much as I love clay Santa, Braden love nutcrackers! He begs for new ones to play with every year. So I was not surprised at all when he picked out this nutcracker for his stocking ornament.

Oh Christmas Tree!

Earlier this week we broke our normal tradition and put our Christmas tree up before Thanksgiving. Our tradition has been to decorate the Friday after Thanksgiving but we just couldn't wait it out this year.

It was a pretty quick process this year. Our tree has been set up with it's 1100 lights in the corner of our garage all year. We covered it with this blue moving blanket thingies to keep it somewhat clean. I was so scared that a strand of lights would not light after a year in the garage but each little light is twinkling.

Our tree has the same assortment of clay Santas, homemade gingerbread men, white plastic snowflakes and red balls every year. We lost a lot of our red ornaments last year so I replaced them. Braden decided to do a little extra decorating on his own. He added batman stickers to each red ball and all kinds of pictures and toys to it.

Our Spooky House

Saturday we dug out the Halloween decorations. My favorite favorite favorite things are these cheap Dollar Tree paper lanterns. We bought 7 and only 4 got hung up. I ripped one, Braden ripped one, and one just didn't work. I love them though. They look so cute hanging up in the arch.

The lanterns are the only thing I bought this year. We bought the big haunted house last year and we've have the dancing paper skeletons for years. This may be their last year though. I had to use an entire roll of tape to hold them together. Next year we may have a pile of skeleton bones on the wall instead.