Chet's 2nd Post, My favorite Christmas decorations?

Yes, that is right. I am going to blog on my very favorite Christmas decorations. Some of you may be asking if Jaime is putting me up to this and the answer is NO. In all honesty, I love the Christmas season and one of my favorite things is the various decorations we put around the house. It is a yearly tradition and I thought I would share with the world some of my favorite things. (As a side note, for those of you concerned by the un-manly nature of this post, I just have to go on record by saying that I have never been all that concerned about appearing manly. Those of you that know me know of my love for goth-girl rock; Garbage, Evanescence and Paramore, as well as my love of the Twilight series of books, yep that's right I said it and I have no issues with it, so there.)

Anyway, here we go.

So, let's start with the outside of the house. We have a 2-story home and I do not own a ladder so we actually pay someone to put lights on the roofline and above the porch. Lining the walkway are some really cool tiny Christmas trees that Jaime and I purchased during an after-Christmas sale at Target a number of years ago. It takes me many hours every year to get all that stuff up, but I like the way it makes the house look and am considering keeping it up year round...There are a number of Christmas ornaments that mean a lot to me. The first one is an ornament that my father and I made when I was like 3. We made them out of some sort of flour and water mix and 27 years later they are still around. I don't have a lot of things from that era of my life and I think it is cool to haul these out every year. My dad has always been a really influential part of my life and I feel like I get to honor that relationship every year when I hang up our ornaments (there are 3 from this era, I have 2 and my dad has 1)

This is the 2nd of the ornaments. It is Santa, in case you can't tell...

Ah yes, this one is super cool. When I was smaller I remember Wendy taking me to a Christmas craft fair at Provo high. There I found this awesome home-made Ghostbusters ornament. To this day I am the only person I know of with unlicensed Ghostbuster merchandise...

So, one of my favorite movies, Christmas or otherwise, is A Christmas Story. This year Jaime purchased for me a leg lamp ornament. Yep, that's right, the soft glow of electric sex right on my tree...(it's a quote from the movie, BTW, I know that at some point I will be asked to explain myself)So, I have this pet peeve about Nativity Scenes. I find it absolutely ridiculous when those cheesy gift stores that sell all sorts of nick-knacks put out Nativity Scenes that feature non-human characters. Knowing this, Jaime purchased for me an ornament that features the traditional Nativity Scene but with Mooses (Meese?). Yep, moose baby Jesus...

This one is especially awesome because I made it. When I was younger we decided to make our own ornaments one year. For some reason I decided to purchase a pair of wooded birds and paint them and then highlight their feathers in glitter-glue. This is the extent of my artistic talent...

OK, last ornament. This one was a gift from a family that I baptised when I was a missionary in Russia. The Russians didn't have much and it meant a lot that they would spare some of what they did have to give me a gift.

There are a couple non-ornament decorations I wanted to bring attention to as well:

I bought this Nativity Scene for Jaime last year. Jaime is into these weird Willow Tree figurines and I thought that this made for a cool decoration but I am always way freaked out by the fact that nothing has a face. Oh well, at least they are human...I think...

One of my favorite traditions we had as kids was the Christmas countdown tree. There are little pockets for treats and each day someone gets to hang an ornament and eat a treat. I used to always love it when it was finally my turn. Wendy was gracious enough to make one for our family when Olivia was born. One of my favorite recent memories of this tradition is explaining to Liv that when the last ornament was hung we knew it was Christmas Eve. When we weren't watching her she tried to hang all the ornaments up to "hurry" Christmas along...I love the logic of kids...

This is my Christmas stocking. I remember buying it at the mall when I was a kid. We all had some sort of bear-looking stockings. It brings lots of fun memories about trying to wake my parents up at 4AM so we could open presents and them saying NO until about 5:30 AM or so. Most of our really cool gifts would not be wrapped and would be sitting out around our stockings. We would play with the gifts that were out until the parental units would finally awaken and we could begin. While technically we were probably lower middle-class growing up,

Dad and Wendy always provided an incredible Christmas for us. I can only imagine how long it took to pay off :)

OK, so for the finale:

So, my very favorite Christmas movie is absolutely the Rankin-Bass classic, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I will have to do a separate blog post about the myriad ways and reasons I love this movie. Anyway, when Jaime and I were first married, she saw an advertisement for this really cool Christmas village and at the rock-bottom price of $49.95. Well, what Jaime didn't realize was that it was actually 8 easy installments of $49.95...

Yeah, so as an indigent married couple I ended up paying over $400 USD for a Christmas village! I told Jaime that I forgive her but to this day I am still not sure...

Anyway, I absolutely love this Christmas village and take great joy from my ownership thereof. Here are some extra shots of said village:

Anyway, this is my monster-sized Christmas post. I hope it was as fun for you as it was for me.
Cheers and Merry Christmas!
Chet