On Sunday I was finally able to turn the living room from “meh” to “holly jolly”. In fact there’s so much holly and so much jolly that I can’t stop smiling when I walk in the room and really, I don’t do that often.

I pulled the boxes out of storage in the morning and when I let the kids read their activity in their Advent Calendar it told them we were going to decorate the tree. They were pretty excited and they love to help. While I do dream of one day owning a ginormous tree, I must admit that the 4-foot tree is really the perfect height for young kids; even Breanna can reach the top branches when it’s on the floor, and I have to say it’s nice to move it up out of the way so that no one falls into it while running around or playing with the dog (not that anything of that sort would ever happen here, I’m sure, ahem).

I also have the lights up around my china hutch which is one of my favorite decorations and I usually keep lighting that up well into the late winter just because it looks pretty and gives the living room some nice soft light. In the meantime, I had a few spare strings of lights so I even put one in the corner of the kids’ room, another in the main bedroom, and one in over the kids’ computer in the living room.

Combined with the other decorations (homemade paper snowflakes, wreath on the door, Santa’s clothesline, snowmen, etc), it’s all I can do to keep from blasting Christmas music all day long. I’m feeling so festive it’s disgusting.

But don’t worry, it will pass. Nothing kills the holiday spirit like knowing you still need to do all your Christmas shopping.

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Just like every year since it began, I’m taking part in Holidailies and will be updating most days (probably not all days since it is the holiday season) between December 7th and January 6th so you can expect a lot of total drivel brilliance over here throughout. Are you taking part too?