Decorating The House For Christmas

I don’t really know why but I have always liked to decorate for Christmas over the first weekend in December. I can’t actually remember when we used to do it as a family when I was growing up but I do remember my Mum putting it off for as long as possible and then wanting to take the tree down as soon after Christmas as she could get away with. Honestly, I’m not much different when it comes to taking the decorations now but that’s because of Erin’s birthday. As she was born on New Year’s Day I like to make sure it stays very separate from Christmas and this means not having any decorations up for her birthday.

Anyway, last weekend was the first in December so that meant we had plans to decorate the house. This year Erin is much more into Christmas and has been getting excited about it for a couple of weeks now. The more she sees Christmas lights, trees and with all of the activities she’s been doing at school has really got Erin into the Christmas spirit I couldn’t wait to get the tree up with her last weekend.

Things didn’t go at all to plan though. Erin had a bad night on Friday and that usually means that she would be ill soon. Sure enough, on Sunday Erin had a really bad cough and was full of cold. She was feeling very sorry for herself and I don’t blame her. I went for a bit of a nap around 1:30pm and didn’t wake up until 4:30pm. Ooops! By this point, Erin was very tired and grumpy and it just wasn’t worth doing.

So, we had to do the rest over a couple of days when John got home from work so we could all do bits of the decorating together. We only have a small Christmas tree as, although we have a very large living room/ dining room, we don’t actually have anywhere to put a big tree without it getting in the way of something. I bought a 7ft Christmas tree the first year after moving into this house and it’s lived in the loft ever since.

Our house isn’t really suited to a lot of Christmas decorations because of the lay out so I like to make a feature of our open fireplace. I picked up our garland a few years ago now for about £5 and it’s one of my favourite pieces. I usually wrap battery powered lights around it but I forgot that I needed new ones this year and I haven’t had chance to buy them yet. Some of the decorations are borrowed from my sister as she hasn’t really lived somewhere where she could decorate until this year so I need to replace the Nutcrackers too at some point.