Nicole and Brandon: Christmas Time is Here!

FINALLY I'm getting around to giving you our Christmas house tour! You may wonder how I can take SO MANY pictures of my Christmas tree during this post....but it's just a fact of life. :) I love Christmas and I love my Christmas tree! Haha! So here we go...

We spent a decent amount of hours (really) at Lowe's picking out all of our Christmas lights for the house (inside and out) and for our tree....and even had to make a second trip...and third to Meijer. :) We're hardcore. Anyways, here is Brandon putting the lights on our "pre-lit" tree that no longer is "pre-lit". We both have two jobs when it comes to our tree and it works well. He puts it together. I fluff it out. He puts the lights up. I put all of the decorations and ornaments on it. Team work :)


Sorry this pic is blurry!

Here it is all done:

We've yet to find the perfect tree topper, but I've had my eye on a few on Target.com so I will be checking their sale after Christmas!

While I decorated the tree and house, Brandon was outside putting up ALL of our outdoor lights. Now this was quite the debate between me and the Lowe's worker. I HATE LED Christmas lights. I find them cold, not warm the way I think Christmas lights should be. (No offense to all you LED lovers). But, I also wanted the big old fashioned bulbs and many people have told me, including said Lowe's guy, that they will start your house on fire! So...LED won, but we tried them all out in the store until we found ones that met my approval. In the end, the warm white LED and and our colorful LED's met my approval. :) I think that guy avoided me on our second trip into Lowe's!!!

Here is Brandon working hard :)

My DREAM is to light up the GIGANTIC tree in front of our house....so if anyone has ANY idea how we could get lights up to the top of this tree that is surrounded by power lines, share it please! And then maybe if you want to donate funds to the purchase of 100 strands of lights...haha!

Although.....if I were really Clark Griswold I would just uproot it and put it in my living room...hmmmm that's a thought. ;)

And now around to the garage....

And here it is in the dark!

We had plans for the lights to go up around the dormers and up the peak, but we didn't have a tall enough ladder and the roof was too steep...but a ladder is on our Christmas list, so we'll see!

And here is the garage and back gate. (And our candy cane bush!) This is my favorite! It looks like Charlie Brown to me!

And my Christmas tree saying hi of course...

So moving inside, I will now share with you some of my growing collection of Christmas stuff! You may have figured out that I love wreaths so here are my two Christmas wreaths. The first is new. I bought it at Pier 1 Imports this year and I love it! The second one was my grandma's and it will always be my favorite.

Pier 1 wreath

Grandma's wreath

This table centerpiece is also from Pier 1 this year.

Funny how the flame reflects like it's floating :)

We bought this garland in Holland to go around our chandelier in the dining room but it ended up being too big so now it's on the piano, but I really like it there.

A little more up close:

And something Brandon actually picked out:

The kitchen needed some Christmas spirit too:

Brandon's mom gave us the cute little plant :)

And my favorite, our "romantic" bedroom ;)

And our mistletoe! Can you see it!?

Now, another thing I love about the Christmas season besides all of the decorating is wrapping gifts! I LOVE wrapping gifts!!! And yes, I will wrap yours.....if you can find a way to light up my tree in the front yard and supply some lights!

In order to have fun wrapping, I believe you must have a healthy stock of wrapping stuff. By that I mean fun paper, lots of ribbon, bows, different tags, bags, ornaments and tissue paper! Here is my haul before it took over my living room!