Christmas Tour 2009

Welcome to my little spot on the Christmas tour of homes. I hope you're enjoying the different tours at The Nester's place. I think it's fitting that the tour moved this year, because I moved too (my house, that is!) If you want to see what Christmas looked like at our old house, you can check it out here. But enough of that - here you are standing outside while I'm yapping. Come on in, won't you?
This is what you see immediately after coming in the front door. Hopefully I'll have a few more cards up on display before too long. I hope to change a lot at my house during the upcoming year. The wallpaper here and the metal part of the light fixture are two things that I hope to say goodbye to soon.
Here is a better view of the Christmas village under the mirror. A box of Christmas decorations got displaced in our recent move, so my village has a few bare spots. I sure hope I find the box before next Christmas!
Across from the mirror is the front room. These presents will find their way under the tree Christmas Eve, but for now they serve as decoration for my piano. When we moved, we doubled our house size, which means I have a lot more space to decorate for Christmas. I'm looking forward to the after-Christmas sales this year!
Moving on to the living room, the remainder of what I can find of my Christmas village is behind the couch. It's a bit tricky finding places to put my village where small hands won't be tempted.
The top of our entertainment unit seemed to be a good place for our nativity set, our Advent calender, and our Jesse Tree. If you'd like more information about the Jesse Tree, you can read what I wrote about it last year here.
Next to the entertainment unit is this floor lamp, which I tried to make a bit more Christmassy. The snowman sign on the wall was one of my first Christmas decorations. I've had it since I was a freshman in college, so it's (yikes!) 10 years old.
One of my favorite things about our new house is that we finally have a fireplace! I have a wreath to hang above the mantle, but it hasn't been hung up yet.
The obligatory tree photo. DH and BB decorated the tree for me the day after Thanksgiving. Somehow, our tree has no top piece. As the tree stayed in the same box all year long, I have no explanation for this. I do, however, notice that we can fit a lot more tree in our new house... ;D

Our living room has a sliding glass door which is right next to a very large window in our kitchen. I put the stars and the snowflakes up in an attempt to make the large area more Christmassy, but I'm not crazy about the end result. I think I should probably add lots of garland to my after-Christmas shopping list.
A previous owner had a plant hook in the ceiling by the window. Since it's in the kichen, I thought some cookie cutters would be cute to hang up.

When we first married, all of our Christmas stuff was snowmen. I still have a lot of snowmen/silver and blue stuff, but the red and green is gradually taking over. In the pictures above and below, you can see my attempt to reconcile the two types of decor. Not entirely successful, but it will look better next year.

The light above the kitchen table. I've found it's pretty hard to take a decent picture of things like this.
Our Advent wreath on the kitchen table. I know that technically the white candle is supposed to appear on Christmas Eve, but I wouldn't remember to light it on Christmas Eve if I didn't see it out. Maybe in a few years when BB is old enough to remind me...
We have a long wall in our kitchen that is awaiting some shelving. In the meantime, I decorated it with some red wooden garland I bought at a yard sale last year. I topped it off with some Christmas card ornaments to hide where I affixed the garland.

On the underside of my upper kitchen cabinets, I hung some more cookie cutters using some red yard. Speaking of cabinets, I'm currently trying to decide what color I should paint my cabinets. If you have a few minutes, won't you stop by my cabinet post and give your opinion?

This is our alternative to an Advent calender. I made it out of a dollar store pizza pan with some magnets on the back. DH drew the design on for me using Sharpies. I use double stick tape to affix the Hershey kisses. This is the first year that BB has been interested in eating the Hershey kisses, which means that I'll be making another one of these for next year. Momma doesn't like sharing chocolate!
I hope you've enjoyed the tour of our house. If you come back here tomorrow, you can see the pictures that didn't make this post (aka, the ones where BB intervened).