On Decorating for Christmas

When do y’all decorate for Christmas? For us, we typically spend Thanksgiving weekend decorating for Christmas, with the goal of having everything ready for "go" by Sunday night. Sometimes we meet that goal, sometimes we don’t.

This year Denis and I have joked about getting the outside lights on NOW so that’s one step saved. We wouldn’t turn them on – but have them loaded on the bushes and trees so we don’t have to do it Thanksgiving weekend.

A couple days ago Denis joked about hanging the wreaths in the windows now, too – little did he know that just a few hours before he emailed me that thought, I had already been thinking it. This weekend is a "free" weekend so I think we just might do it.

This year we’re going to move some of our inside decorations around. We normally put our big tree in the bay window in the living room, so that when we host our White Elephant party we can spread out into the dining room. However, this year we are already up to 39 people attending, with more to RSVP. Knowing that we usually only end up with 2/3rds of the people who say they are coming, there is potential for this year to be our highest number of attendees yet. There’s NO WAY all those people will fit in the living room and dining room for the White Elephant game.

So this year we’re thinking about moving our entertainment center to the far corner (a much easier thing to do now that it’s on sliders on hardwood floors – it’s just a matter of gently nudging it over) and putting our tree in the area to the right of the entertainment center. This way we can have people in the TV room as well as the kitchen and eat-in area. The more I think about this configuration, the more I think it will work.

As a result of having the regular tree in the TV room, we’d move the kids’ small tree to be in the bay window. Since it’s only 3 feet tall, we’d set it on the end table we have in the window area. Our third tree, the tall slim tree that we’ve only had for a couple years, will remain in the foyer for people to see what they walk in the front door.

I’ll be curious to see how Dobby the Dog does with decorations. He chews everything in sight when he’s bored and left to his own devices, so if we do set up the big tree in the TV room, we’ll need to rethink where we keep him during the workday – I’d be afraid that he’d chew up the low-hanging ornament. Of course, he could also cower in fear over a big tree being in the TV room. With that dog you never know.

So again, when do you decorate for Christmas? When do you take things down? Will you judge us if we start putting out some things now (bush lights and wreaths), even if we don’t turn on the lights?