Welcome to our home....{2011 Christmas tour}

Hello! I am so glad you came to visit!

I decided it would be fun to join in The Inspired Room's Christmas Home Tours. I am joining not because our home is anything spectacular or grand (it's not) but rather because our family has fun doing a little bit of simple decorating using things that we have and it is fun to have company (even online company) over to share our home and festivities with.

 So come on in and I will give you a tour of our simple home.

This weekend was the weekend of decorating the inside- I don't like to do it to early because I am still enjoying Thanksgiving decorations and so we will probably leave some (or maybe a lot) of these decorations up into January. On Saturday night Ken and Aaron went to a Hockey game and the rest of us had fun doing some decorating to surprise them when they got home.

 We hung a swag that I had made from some greenery we picked from my parents woods up above the coat closet which you see first thing when you walk in the entryway. I also pulled out some old ice skates to decorate with.

 The white skates with jingle bell toes are old ones of mine but they are to uncomfortable to wear anymore. The others I think may have been my Dad's when he was young. I love the way they look on the closet door.

After you hang up your coat why don't you come on upstairs....

 You can join these crazy and fun children for a cup of peppermint hot chocolate (a special gift from my sister) and some Sesame-Honey Candy (Pasteli) that Aaron and I just made.

Aaron hard at work cutting the candy. He loves to help make snacks.

 When we were decorating on Saturday night Jonathan's big project was to run a long string of white lights across the tops of all the cupboards and around the kitchen and then also around the top of the windows in the dining room. We don't usually put lights in the house (instead we have them all over outside) so the kids think ( and I am enjoying it too) it is pretty neat to have some inside.

  On the cupboard tops we also added some evergreen boughs and pine cones and some splashes of red. I am really enjoying the red this year. Some years I have tried to avoid it but I like it a lot this year.

Closer detail of the cupboard tops.

Lights, greenery, grapevine and frosty pine cones (which we frosted) above the kitchen sink.

The lights in the dining room at night. Snowflakes on the window were made by Jonathan.

Here is closer detail of the cross stitch picture on our Kitchen wall. This is one of the many cross stitch pictures that Mara made this year.

Now lets walk over to the living room and chat for a bit.

On the wall is one of my favorite decorating places. The shelf underneath our family picture. We also hung another swag up above it.

 Here are some details of the shelf.  I have fun adding all sorts of odds and ends to it that I think go with the theme. If you haven't noticed already, I love pine cones and evergreens. I love the outdoors and enjoy bringing the outdoors in for my decorating.

The kids were quite excited about getting the stockings hung up. Our family rule is that all gifts have to fit in the stocking. Someday I think it would be very fun to have a fireplace mantle to hang them from but for now they hang from the half wall by our stairs.

 The other side of the living room is our music area. I enjoyed having poinsettias and fresh flowers (along with evergreen, pine cones and candles) available to decorate the piano top with.

 Here are a couple of more wreaths that we are displaying. The grapevine/evergreen one is a combination of the kid's efforts (I am tempted to place the Reindeer a little differently but currently am working to appreciate the uniqueness of it) I do love that they like to help decorate. The other wreath was one that some friends and I made from some old music. It fits in well in my entry way where I have a variety of music pictures.

Now to head downstairs....

 We don't have a ton of decorations here but it looks very changed to us because we did some major rearranging and really open up this room which had been before split in half with some big bookshelves. We are really loving it! I have had fun adding some evergreen and pine cones and other rustic touches as well as some snowmen decorations.

This snowman wreath got to be inside out of the weather this year.

 Here is where the bookshelves went...

 In our bookworms room. We added some garland and sparkly jewels to the top of the shelves and then our homemade nativity from a couple of years ago got put in here as well and also some new nativity stuff that Megan just made.

Thanks so much for visiting!

We hope you enjoy seeing our outside lights as you go. I wasn't able to get a picture of them all (as I didn't feel like running that far down the road to take the picture) and this picture is rather blurry but it gives you an idea. :-)

 How do you like to decorate for Christmas? I would love to hear from you!