It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas!

I finally got around to finishing up our Christmas decorating and taking some photos! Let's take a Christmas tour through the house, shall we?

The entry bench got some Christmasy pillows...

The piano room has some holiday cheer on the table...

It's just a couple of the glass pieces from the candy buffet at our wedding filled with old ornaments and faux berries (and a little basket with pinecones and my cute little Santa tea set!).

The half-bathroom was already looking pretty festive with its new green walls, but I added a couple things...

Santa soap!

I hung a couple things on the hallway walls...

In the living room, I set up the nativity on the console table...

Baby Jesus will be here on Christmas! 

The rest of the living room is looking pretty Christmasy as well...

I want to get something big-ish to go in the middle of the entertainment center... but I haven't found it yet!

This was a post-Christmas 80% off at Hobby Lobby find last year!

I love my reindeer!

Some holly fabric and I Spy Christmas on the coffee table!

And of course... we can't forget the TREE!

It looks so tiny in this big two-story room. It looked big in the apartment, but this house just makes it look so small! Haha.

I've already got most of our Christmas presents wrapped and under the tree!

We've got a couple new additions to the tree this year. We picked out a Christmas ornament on our Spring Break vacation in March...

We received a few "Our First Christmas Together" ornaments as gifts last year to commemorate our first married Christmas...

From my godmother...thanks Sue!

From my aunt and uncle...thanks Aunt Diane and Uncle Chris!

and from my parents... thanks Mom and Dad!

... and we finally got a tree topper!

We had some extra garland that Jeff used to decorate with in college, so I put it up across the window sills with some Command strip hooks! As we get Christmas cards, we're punching holes in them and hanging them on the garland with ornament hooks! Last year we tried to put all of the cards on the fridge and just ran out of room, so I'm really excited about this new card display area! 

See? Christmas cards!!

The window sills were the perfect place for all our little Christmas decorations:

I love those Christmas puppies so much! They just make me smile. In fact, I like them so much that I took a video of them doing their thing in their new location (see last year's video here):

Christmas Puppies 2011! from Spirals & Spatulas on Vimeo.

I made the bear put his arm around Santa. They're buddies.

If you're in the living room and you look up, you'll see the upstairs balcony trimmed in garland and lights! I love this so much!

It looks pretty from upstairs too!

Here's a view of the tree from upstairs:

Moving on to the kitchen, I've got my holiday-scented candles burning...

There's a little Christmas vignette on the edge of the counter (I did something similar with our fall decorations and loved it, so I repeated it for winter!):

(Those JOY blocks were $1 for all 3 at Hobby Lobby last January!)

Here's the clay snowman Jeff made in kindergarten (probably my favorite Christmas decoration!)...

I love this little Christmas print from Etsy seller tagteamtompkins! I found this black frame with gold edging at the Dollar Store of all places, and I love it!

Over by the coffee maker, a metal snowman tealight holder sits with my newest houseplant!

I actually bought this plant in October... it had a fall-colored plastic wrapping around the base tied with a little gold elastic. After Thanksgiving, I took the wrapping off (intending to transfer it to a pot), and I found this plastic snowflake cup under the fall wrapping! A dual-season plant (isn't that so clever?!?)! He'll just have to wait another few weeks for that pot!

On the kitchen island, we have a little bowl of Christmas peanut M&Ms and our Texas tree:

I found this snowman bowl at the Dollar Store too! So cute! It's just not Christmas without peanut M&Ms...

I love this tree. I made it and mailed it to Jeff while he was living in South Carolina so he could have a little Texas holiday cheer, and he kept it all those years, and now we have it back in Texas where it belongs. :)

Annnd here's our kitchen table! I bought myself a red tablecloth and silver chargers because I've been wanting both for so long and I just couldn't take it anymore. Haha. I'm going to use the chargers and tablecloth for a lot more than just Christmas, so I think it was a good purchase! 

My aunt and uncle gave us these Christmas dishes last year after they got them at a White Elephant gift exchange and didn't want them. It's just a set of four place settings, so we had to put salad plates on the two end chairs. To be honest, they're pretty bad quality (they have green rims around the edges, but about half of the plates have half the rim missing, most of the trees are crooked on the mugs, etc.), but until I one day get Christmas dishes of my own, I LOVE having these!

(Example of a crooked tree. Haha!)

I love my DIY advent wreath even more now that it's surrounded by a pretty tablecloth and Christmas dishes!

Last but not least, our stockings are once again hanging at the foot of our bed:

We somehow managed to buy a house without a fireplace/mantle, so we're in for at least another few years of hanging our stockings here! It's kind of sentimentally wonderful though because we both lived in London for a few years as children, and they hang their stockings at the end of the bed in England to wait for "Father Christmas!" This might just end up being a tradition for our family.

I have to say, I'm even more in love with our new house after decorating it for Christmas. We're slowly building up lots of memories here, and I just love it. I think I like this year's decor even better than last year's at the apartment (see last year's here)! Christmas looks good on our new home. :)