Now that December is here, I can say my Christmas decorations are up without judgment.
I’ve actually had them up since November 1, because I love decorating. This year, I have a white, silver and mint green color scheme, which I planned last year.
My best advice is to go shopping a few days after Christmas for decorations. I got a whole tree worth of ornaments, matching wrapping paper, and a smaller tree for our basement last year for cheap. The only things we had to get this year were a fourth stocking and a star for the top of our tree.
The star we chose was a pretty, beaded, silver star from Home Goods, and it’s lovely in theory.
In practice, it’s a bit heavy for our fake tree. And we can’t have real trees because my husband is allergic to pine.
But also, dogs.
Our dogs love to play with each other, and they play rough.
We try to keep them away from the tree, but it doesn’t work. They run around, grunting, growling and making all kinds of loud dog noises at each other until I get sick of it and separate them. And even then, Cosmo is clumsy. I tell him daily as he backs up towards the tree to ‘watch where your butt is going’ which he doesn’t.
Our shatter-proof ornaments are knocked down at least once a day by a rogue tail, and more than once Cosmo has accidentally spun the tree, resulting in the heavy star tilting and sitting crooked atop our tree.
Neither of us are tall enough to fix it, we don’t own a step ladder, and I don’t want to stand on a chair. So it’s just crooked.
Our tall friends like to take the fallen ornaments and hang them from the star because they know we can’t reach them, and they find it funny.
So we have a crooked star, but we also have happy, playful dogs and laughing friends, so that’s really all that matters. And I have a step ladder on our Christmas list for the fourth year in a row.