For the past couple of days, my fiance and I have been getting into the Christmas spirit–and spreading the holiday cheer throughout our house. I had been meaning to get the boxes of our decorations out of the attic since the day after Thanksgiving, and just the other day we finally accomplished that task.

There was a small blip in our plan, however; and to fully understand it, you have to first understand that I am a person who tends to operate on emotion in certain circumstances. I have a very logical brain when it comes to matters such as my business and my ability to code a website with my eyes closed, but when it comes to my surroundings, I am all emotion. For instance, the first time my fiance and I looked at our house, I was immediately overcome with a sense of home and belonging. After looking at just four houses total, we very easily came to the conclusion that this was the house for us–and I was emotionally attached from the get-go. So when we got our Christmas decorations out of the attic, I started with getting the Christmas tree out. After getting it halfway up, I promptly declared that I got nothing but bad feelings from it, that it was too small and made me sad. It was a tree that we had bought for our old apartment that I have nothing but very negative feelings toward, and I absolutely could not make that tree work for the first Christmas we will have in our home. We immediately set out to get a new one–a house tree, as I referred to it as.

About an hour and a half later we were on our way home with a perfect house tree that meets all of the requirements I had in my head about what it should be–it’s artificial (I have no interest in cleaning up the mess a real tree leaves), it’s bigger than me at 7.5ft tall and almost 5ft in diameter, and it is beautifully full.

The picture above is our Christmas tree fully decorated. Below are pictures of our living room decorated. I held off on decorating our dining room and kitchen until after this weekend because we are having a birthday party for my younger stepdaughter who will be turning 7. There’s nothing quite like a house half decorated for Christmas and half decorated for an Uglydoll theme birthday party.

My fiance Allen stringing lights on the Christmas tree while one of our cats, Vincent, “supervises,” of course.

Santa and Mrs. Clause figures that are really cool because they are made of dough! How cool is that? Also a look at a reindeer made out of wood that was made by my great-grandfather when I was a child and has recently been repainted by my grandmother.

A snowman dough figurine, another look at the wooden reindeer, garland on the banister of our stairs, and a snowman on a skateboard because that’s a normal thing for snowmen to do.

Reindeer dough figurine

My aunt gave me this frog plush that sings Christmas carols a few years ago. Its voice is very high-pitched, and because I am sometimes a horrible (but hilarious!) person, I have been known to play it repeatedly and scare the crap out of our cats.