Christmas Decorations

[FarmerJamie]

It's been a family tradition to put the decorations on Friday after Thanksgiving. The kids are old enough, I just now have to get the tree down from the garage storage and get to sit and relax. They did a great job. Outside didn't get done because of the snowy weather that blew in Friday afternoon - Thanksgiving was 60 degrees and sunny, but we were visiting all day. LOL

Those little "guns" advertised for fixing strands of light are AWESOME! I'm not an electrician, so I don't know how it works exactly, but it works! Particularly since many 100 light strands are just two 50 light strands spliced together.

 

[FarmerChick]

tree is up and i am DONE with all shopping and everything is wrapped!

and no debt.

NOW THAT IS EFFICIENT!! we did very well this year.

 

[FarmerChick]

Yes! Nowadays I celebrate the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ every day and thank God for His gift to the world and to me, personally. I decorate my heart every day in celebration of that gift to me and in my soul all the bells ring, heavenly choruses shout and sing and the lights all shine brightly until I see Him face to face. I lay down my head each night in thankfulness and awaken with praise on my lips...the celebration never really ends!

I do both. I get the best of both situations. I do as you said and I get to have cheery decorations and Santa visits

it doesn't have to be one way or the highway

 

[FarmerChick]

I am not able to decorate this year... didn't get to last year either :/ I like having things up, it makes me feel cheerful. Right now, my living room is tore down to the studs, and we just closed up the gaping 5 x 10 hole to the great outdoors an hour ago, as the temp dropped below freezing I am also WAY behind with gifts - only have two made, out of 12 needed! What was I thinking insisting on all homemade gifts this year?!! It's just really hard to get things done right now. I'm hoping my MIL went crazy with the decorations again this year - so I can 'soak it up' at her house

WOW SS you got that major stress thing happening. You want to enjoy the holidays the way you like, but then the house tore up has got to be on your nerves!
hang in there----hit the roads at night and soak up others lights also! One thing we love to do is drive around a bit. DD loves that. checking out displays. It does add some fun to the season.

 

[moolie]

YMMV but for us... although Christmas has an obvious religious connotation, neither Christ nor the Bible exhorts Christians to "celebrate" any biblical events, nor is the Christmas season actually the time of year when Christ was born. We believe as followers of Christ that we are simply asked to live as Jesus did, as much as it is humanly possible (because we obviously are flawed creatures and are not able to attain His divine level of perfection).

So although we are Christians and go to church regularly as well as on Christmas Eve (and of course are thankful for the birth of Christ as well as for His resurrection) the modern holiday as it stands (for us) is about quality time spent with family. We do exchange gifts, but our gift-giving is not about how much is spent but rather showing love for each other, and much of what we do is home-made or small purchased items that are just right for the recipient.

Nothing that would EVER incur any sort of "debt" or look like what the news is lately reporting is "average" holiday spending (which I heard last night is $700 per family )

As to our specific family traditions, when our kids were little we didn't put the tree up till Christmas Eve and then we left it up till Ukrainian Christmas on January 7th. These are old family traditions shared by both hubs' and my families--we both always went to church with our families on Christmas Eve and then came home and opened gifts that evening, and my Grandma was part Ukrainian so she always kept the tree up till January 7th to remember Ukrainian Christmas (although she never did the full-on Christmas Eve dinner and accompanying traditions).

We used to have a fake tree, because when we first got married we lived in an apartment and weren't allowed a real tree due to fire regulations. But our $25 fake tree was getting pretty tired looking a few years ago (after 17 Christmases!) so we have switched to real, and find that we really enjoy having a little bit of nature in our house during the cold months. Now that we put up a real tree, which we buy from Scouts Canada, we have to buy it sooner than Christmas Eve or we won't get one, so we usually buy it sometime during the first week of December and keep it up as long as possible. They've all made it to Ukrainian Christmas so far, but in case one year our tree doesn't make it that long we also have a small wrought iron table top tree with special ornaments that our kids have made at school and Sunday School over the years--you might call it a Charlie Brown tree, but it is the center piece of our dining table through December and into January and always brings back happy memories.

Our home is decorated simply: we have a tree in the front window with a string of multi-coloured lights, some glass ball ornaments that we purchased for our first Christmas together after we got married, a few other special ornaments picked up over the years, and most importantly many ornaments made by hand by our kids and ourselves over the years. There is also the small table-top wrought iron tree on the dining table decorated with what the kids feel are the most special hand made ornaments. We have a string of wooden clothes pins, each with a painted wooden heart glued on, that we clip our Christmas cards to--this hangs across the windows in our family room. We have a few other special hand made decorations that hang in the kitchen window over the sink or that sit on the kitchen windowsill--I love to look at these as I do dishes. And we have a fake evergreen wreath that the girls and I made for the front door--we wired on pine cones and some fake poinsettias.

 

[Beekissed]

Yes! Nowadays I celebrate the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ every day and thank God for His gift to the world and to me, personally. I decorate my heart every day in celebration of that gift to me and in my soul all the bells ring, heavenly choruses shout and sing and the lights all shine brightly until I see Him face to face. I lay down my head each night in thankfulness and awaken with praise on my lips...the celebration never really ends!

I do both. I get the best of both situations. I do as you said and I get to have cheery decorations and Santa visits

it doesn't have to be one way or the highway

For some that is true. For me, the one Way is sufficient for me...I just don't seem to need anything else.