Christmas time is here! Hooray!! Joy to the world!!! I love Christmas time, and couldn’t be happier to be celebrating this festive season! Vince Guaraldi’s Charlie Brown Christmas album has already played countless rounds on our ipod. Our lovely friend, Chelsea, arrived on Friday afternoon, just in time to help with decorating!
I purchased an insane amout of holiday scented Yankee candles and had them shipped to Chels before she left, and she was kind enough to lug them all here for us! We joked it was a good thing customs officials didn’t pick her up for smuggling Yankee candles in to the country! With our harvest, gingerbread, and Christmas cookie candles burning, we wasted no time changing into our cozy jammies and got down to the important business of decorating the house for Christmas!
It has taken us several years of color combination trial and error (and many broken ornaments, thanks to the cats!) to find the perfect color theme for our tree decor. We’ve settled on a very muted, but glittery gold and silvery combo that we absolutely adore! The glittery ball ornaments are plastic (take that, cats!) and we picked them up at Choithrams last year for a few dirhams- score! They offset the cost of the insanely expensive snowflake ornaments, stockings and tree skirt we fell in love with at Crate in Barrel later that Christmas season =). During our Christmas trip to Germany last year we found the beautiful crackle mercury glass balls, which completed our tree beautifully!
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Chels is also into photography, so we had a great little photo session with the tree the second we were done decorating! She has captured so many beautiful photos during her adventures in Shanghai already, so stop by her blog to check them out!.jpg "trimmingtreeblog08")
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Tree huggers….jpg "trimmingtreeblog10")
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The stockings were hung by the tealights with care….jpg "trimmingtreeblog15")
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Enjoying our beautiful Christmas stars from the Munich Christmas market….jpg "trimmingtreeblog17")
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Creepy Stuart makes an appearance… .jpg "trimmingtreeblog20")
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The real manger scene, sans Creepy Stuart=).jpg "trimmingtreeblog23")
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Our beautiful spinning Christmas pyramid (in German: Weihnachtspyramide), also from the Munich Christmas market…
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Once the decorations were all up, we curled up on the couch to enjoy the ambiance. Isaac came across a link that had him laughing SO HARD he was in tears… and, of course, I had to capture the moment. Unstoppable belly-laughter of this magnitude consumes Isaac a few times a year, and it is completely infectious and SO MUCH fun to watch!
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Isaac was reading a list of really bad similes created by students (not ours!), and the one that sent him into this fit of hysterics was something along the lines of, “Grandpa’s mind was like a steel trap, only one that had been left out in the rain and rusted shut.”.jpg "trimmingtreeblog30")
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I love this man so much!!!
Photos from last year’s Christmas decorations can be seen here. We hope you all are enjoying the season as much as we are. Merry Christmas, everyone!
