Deck the Halls

It's been pretty crazy around here getting ready for Christmas.  We are not doing the whole kit and caboodle with decorating this year, as we are leaving on the 18th and won't be back until mid-January.  I didn't want to have to deal with putting away a ton of decorations after a hectic month of travel.  And in the heat we have been having lately in just Spring, I can't imagine I would feel like storing Christmas and New Year's decorations in the 90 degree heat of Summer while everyone else was at the pool.  So I made an executive decision and took a few of the girls decorations out.  Along with the stockings and their trees, we have enough to make it feel festive.  Well, as festive as Christmas in the heat of summer can be...I still just can't get in the mood for Hot Chocolate by the fire and twinkly lights all around when I feel like I am in a sauna.  That's ok - that will be remedied when we land in Colorado for the last 2 weeks of the year!

So, a picture collage of the girls decorating their own trees.  It took everything I had to just take pictures and not help them.  It was killing me that Stinkerbell kept putting her ornaments one on top of the other on top of the next.  And all the same color!  And when MadHatter started hanging her heavy ornaments at the top and the little ones on the bottom, I wanted to reach out and move them around when she wasn't looking.  But I refrained.  Mostly.  I did spin Stinkerbell's tree on her once while she had her back turned, otherwise the tree would have been one sided.  And I gently reminded MadHatter that the bigger the ornament was the heavier it was and it should maybe have the bigger branches.  Other than that, I behaved.  Promise.

We had a chaperon for the whole event.

She was very surprised each time an ornament stayed on.  She had to concentrate pretty hard since we weren't using hooks for most of them.

We stopped to be silly for awhile...and then got serious (you can tell we are serious by the faces we make)

Some final details...

And they were done!  Not bad.  Not bad at all.  They have places of honor in the house - one in the family room, one in the hall outside their rooms (the tree that you can see from the street) and our only real "outside" decoration.

And then we wrote our letters to Santa so that we could get them ready for Papa to take them to the States with him to mail to the North Pole.  We knew we could send them from Chile but they would have had to go out about 6 weeks ago to make it in time, so we decided this was the best idea.  Papa will be dropping them in Miami in a couple of days and we just know we will get a reply soon!

And our elf, Fidget, showed up on Saturday.  She has been up to a lot of antics since coming to our house to visit each day.  I'll update that in one big picture post...