House Tour

In participating in Holiday Homes Tour 2010 hosted by Jen of Jen on the Edge fame. The idea is to show how you decorate your home for the Holidays. We don't really go overboard on decorating for Christmas. Mostly because no one in this household has a speck of Martha Stewart in them. And we're lazy. So there you go, but on to the tour. Lets start outside.

For decorating outside there has been no better invention then light nets. They look better then individual strings of lights and they are much easier to put up and save untold amount of time. What you see is 8 nets with another triangle net for our Holly tree. The lights look great with a little snow on them. I do the lights and Ann puts up the wreaths on our front door

We set our tree up in the living room. This is a Douglas fir bought from a local nursery. Picking out a tree usually takes us over an hour as we literally look at every tree on the lot. This year we found our tree in less then 15 minutes. Pretty amazing for us. I put up the lights and in theory the rest of the family puts the ornaments on the tree. With adult children this becomes somewhat problematic. We couldn't arrange a convenient time for everyone to get together so Ann and I ended up decorating the tree ourselves. We assign a section of the tree to each of our three children, which contain the various ornaments they made in elementary school plus each has an ornament from their respective colleges - Daughter#1 - Ohio University, The Son - Radford University and Daughter#2 - Virginia Tech. I also have an ornament from my alma mater - Auburn University. This year Daughter#1 has the left side of the tree, The Son has the middle and Daughter#2 has the right side of the tree. Daughter#1 has already wrapped a fair number of presents which are now residing under the tree waiting for Christmas morning.

The only other room we really decorate is our family room. We add lighted garland to the fireplace mantel and a lighted wreath. Add in a Nutcracker or two and a couple of poinsettias and you have a festive room. Even more so if there is a fire going in the fireplace. Currently I'm out of wood so that is a bit of the problem. Back in the days we would always have these somewhat shady looking dudes from mid Virginia or West Virginia driving around the neighborhood in their loaded pickups full of firewood to sell. They have all but disappeared in the last three years. The only thing I can think of is so many of my neighbors have switched their fireplaces over to gas that it's not worth their while to try and go door to door selling the wood. I sure could use some though.

That ends my tour. Fell free to drop by anytime this month as I will be updating everyday as part of Holidailies. I hope you and yours have a Merry Christmas and the best during the New Year.