Really decking the halls

It has become tradition to spend the long 3 day weekend after Thanksgiving prepping the house for Christmas. Friday I took down all of the boxes and this is the one of the best parts of the whole experience, going through all of our decorations, sentimental mementos and crafts from years past, some things long forgotten since last year, and marveling over them as newly discovered treasures.

The first thing Jadyn wanted was for Jake to read her a Christmas themed book, which of course he obliged:

We then decided to introduce Kuma to the holidays by torturing him with reindeer antlers. Never fear however; that is as far as I will go when it comes to "dressing up" my pets for the holidays:

I spent most of Friday setting out all the indoor decorations. We usually leave the tree for last. It usually gets its' own special day. Looking at the blog from last year, I realized that I posted fall decorations but not any of my Christmas ones, except of course for our THREE trees, a tradition that will remain in effect this year.

Here is our mantel:

My favorite area to decorate, the entryway console table:

And the dining room:

And I know this may seem silly, to show you a picture of Kuma's kennel but this special stocking has been passed down to him from Utah, who received it as a gift from the vet staff after his first knee surgery:

Saturday we put both the kids trees up and that night our family tree while watching our favorite holiday movie, The Polar Express. It was a great way to start off the holiday season.

One of our family traditions is of course that the kids have their own trees with special ornaments. But we have some new traditions we are expanding on from last year and starting this year. But that will just have to wait for another post.