on the 16th day of christmas

We got pretty much nothing accomplished this weekend.
Nada.
Had a whole list of t0-do's around the house and we ended up with nothing crossed off of it. No painting, no patching, no tile sealing, no chair recovering, no office organization.
Lots of Just Dancing, lots of napping on the couch, lots of playing, lots of relaxing.

I did manage to go out for groceries. There's a good bit of snow (for Nashville) predicted for us for the next 48 hrs, so I knew I wanted to get out before the white stuff hits and everyone panics and the city pretty much shuts down.
Oh, and I did get most of the rest of the Christmas decorations put away in between all that nothing; finally took the wreaths off the house and packed away the kid's Christmas tree and cleared my mantle. It looks sad and empty now. :(

I don't know if it's this year in general or just our area, but it seems no ones in a hurry to say goodbye to Christmas this year. There are lot of houses still with lights on and trees in the windows... and they're still on every night! Love it!!

When the holidays first started looming, I admitted that I sort of dreaded decorating this year.

Which is so not like me, considering I'm usually counting down the minutes until my husband lets me pull out the Christmas tubs from storage.

But I was not looking forward to it this year...
I felt like we were just starting to feel any semblance of normal and settled in our new house... finally not buried in boxes and finally getting furniture arranged to our liking and actual decor on the walls and such.
I was not ready to upheave all of that and essentially start over with Christmas decor. Figuring out where old holiday decorations fit in a new house just sounded like a lot of work. And we have nice vaulted ceilings in our family room... which translates to wanting a nice BIG tree in there. Which translates into rearranging the entire room. Ugh. No thanks.

We normally like things to stay decorated awhile after Christmas; at least thru New Years... I usually try to talk Ryan into leaving it thru at least the twelve days of Christmas (which are in fact the twelve days after Christmas, btw). I'm not the wham, bam, thank you ma'am sort of Christmas girl... I like to stretch it out as long as possible and am always, always sad to see it go.
But this year, to start with, I was in sort of a "if we have to do it, let's do it and get it over with" mindset... get the tree as soon as possible, enjoy it for the mandatory month, and then get it all out of here right after Christmas so we can get on with figuring out our new normal around here which was so rudely interrupted with the holiday season.

But in the end I totally fell in love with lots of little Christmas spots in this new house. Looking at all the Christmas made me happy. My disdain of the holiday decorations earlier this season was replaced slowly with an overwhelming feeling of "I'm not going to want to put this away".
And our month turned into including the twelve days of Christmas which, til just this weekend, stretched to include actually sixteen days of Christmas.
I really didn't want to put it all away.
I really didn't want to put all of this away...