TIS THE SEASON!!!

I ABSOLUTELY LOVE CHRISTMAS!

Seriously (I'm the one person listening to Christmas music the day after Halloween).

Brian and I got most of the Christmas decorations out the Sunday after Thanksgiving and then we got our tree yesterday.

I am very, very traditional when it comes to Christmas decorations. I'm a firm believer in a white light façade and I've spent the first 2.5 years of our marriage convincing Brian of the same. :-) (And now he agrees with me!)

I'm OK with multicolored lights on other peoples' houses--just not ours :-)

So we have very lovely candles in our 20 windows (on an 8 hour timer from 3:30-11:30 p.m.) and a very lovely fake, prelit, white-light Christmas tree in our front window (in the study). We also have garland on our three front "square" columns. We bought some icicle lights, but they seem like a giant pain to put up, so those may have to wait until next year after we can research the situation a bit! :-)

Inside our front hall we have our nativity scene and my Christmas village (http://www.department56.com/content.aspx?cid=VLXC&ms=PRD&msi=58994&smenu=Products).

In our "great room" [lame name], we have our real tree and it's awesome this year. (I wasn't feeling well yesterday, so Brian went to get it by himself and he did a fantastic job.)

(To digress for a brief moment, it is wayyyyy easier to bring in a Christmas tree into our house with a flat driveway than to bring it into our 2nd floor apartment that sits on a hill.)

So, last night we decorated the tree (and by "we" I mean "me" for 45 minutes and "Brian" for 5 minutes). Because we're super compromisers, we have multicolored lights on our tree and I have to say that it looks quite pretty.

I'll try to get some pictures up later this week, but I'm not sure how the house pictures will come out because I'll need to take them at dusk.

Yay Christmas! (Oh yeah, and we have tickets to the Nutcracker and we're going to go to the Raleigh Boychoir's Carols of Christmas.)

BTW, Gatsby hasn't paid too much attention to the tree except that he doesn't like it much when his ball rolls behind it and he thought it was fun to drink the water when I was pouring it into the tree stand. He also likes the tree skirts on both trees, but he knows that it doesn't make us happy if he plays with them, so he's been leaving them alone lately.

He kinda looked at us like we were crazy as we were bringing in the "dead tree" yesterday.