It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Last Christmas we were so busy working on the house that we never found the time to decorate or get a tree (much to my disappointment) so this year it was priority number 1 to get a tree and deck the halls. We contiplated cutting our own tree down but due to our super busy weekends we decided to go down the street and pick one out of a lot. Before we went we carefully meausred to see how big of a tree we could get and decided a 6 and a half foot tall tree and 4 and a half foot wide tree would be perfect. What would have been more perfect would have been if we brought a measuring tape with us. After picking out a pretty tree (from Maine yay!) that according to the tree man was about 7 feet tall (according to his "if I hold my hand up it's 7 feet" rule) we paid and loaded the tree on the car and drove home. Now our ceilings are 8 feet tall, so theoretically, the tree should have had no problem fitting into our living room. We set everything up and got the tree inside, started to tilt the tree up, and realized when the tree was still at a 60 degree angle and touching the ceiling that it was too tall. Now, if I were the tree man I would invest in a tape measure since he was charging by the foot and we got basically a foot and a half extra on our tree. Anyway, we were able to cut enough off for the tree to fit with the star on top and if I do say so myself, it looks quite nice.

We also added a few decorations around the house including stockings for the dogs and us. (please don't judge our music on the TV it was Pandora's choice not ours).

fuzzy but gives the effect

We have a place down the street from us which is a Catholic Shrine (called La Salette) that every year creates a display of 10 acres of Christmas lights. It is extremely impressive and people come from all over to come and see them and if you're around you should check them out and come visit us! Since we live on the main street that brings everyone back into town, anybody that leaves the Shrine drives down our street. This means that everyone on our street does a pretty good job with their lights (even though anything we can do pretty much pales in comparison to the shrine) and we wanted to make sure we did a good job as well. Even though it was really cold today, Nate climbed ladders and hung lights and made our house very pretty (and didn't fall off the roof which was good).