Only 5 days and a wake up until Christmas!

Jasper loves to sit here. He lays under the tree every evening.

That’s right, you read that correctly. There are only 5 days (and a wake up) before Christmas is on top of us. Wow did that sneak up fast! Normally I’m counting down the days and wishing that Christmas would hurry up and get here! This year I feel like I just put away Thanksgiving leftovers and I still feel like I have a month to get ready for Christmas! Not the case my friends, not the case! It’s here. Well it’s almost here! 🙂

This year is our first real Christmas in our new house (last year we technically lived here but we had just moved in and we were actually at the beach for Christmas) So I suppose I should say this is the first year that we are celebrating Christmas in the new house. I swear I am not moving for a LONG time! We’ve barely had a Christmas in the same house since we got married 7 years ago. I’m ready to stay here for a while. I think that’s why I got so excited about decorating this year.

I had space to put up a real tree!! I actually had a pretty house to decorate and places to put things. I was very happy about that indeed. I went with a candy cane, peppermint theme this year for the tree and a few of the decorations. I’ll probably keep this theme for a few years and then change it out. Does anyone else have themes? I normally just throw whatever ornaments we have on the tree and call it a day haha. But again with the whole being in the new house with plans of making it a long term home, I just felt like I needed something fresh and new!

Another thing I wanted to share with you was this decoration that my mom made for me. Mom is addicted to Pinterest and pinned an ice skate decoration from Chalklegs.com! She found my old ice skates and created this cute decoration for my house! I love it! I hung it right on the coat closet door by the front door.

When I have kids I will totally be getting a “Santa Key”. We technically have a chimney but we don’t really use it (there is a space heat stuck in it haha) and the fireplace is in the “man cave” downstairs so it’s not like I’m really going to hang cute stockings on it 😉

This! This is my new table centerpiece! I bought a snowflake table runner for the table but it still looked so empty. I went out to Marshalls the other night with the hope of finding a Christmas themed centerpiece but came up empty handed. All of their Christmas items were picked through and mainly Silver and Gold colored. Nothing really stood out as something that would match my candy cane theme very well.

But as I as walking through the clearance section a woman stopped me to get my opinion on a centerpiece she was putting together with a vase and flower arrangement that she had put together with items that she had picked up throughout the store. I then found myself searching through the clearance section for red vases. I found this one above for $6.00. It already had the twine wrapped around it too! I bought that and a tall white candle with the hopes of inspiration hitting me as I made my way home. It did and as soon as I got home I pulled the bell ornament off of my tree and hot glued it onto the twine! 🙂 Not too bad for a $10 thrown together centerpiece 🙂

We may have been stressed with deadline this months but we did have a little bit of time to enjoy some Christmas lights! We try to make it a point to visit the Casville Lights each year and I’m so glad that we took the time to go the other weekend.

The Casville Lights are just that, Lights….tons and tons and tons of lights. A Family about 30 minutes from where we live decorates their entire property with thousands of lights every year. You can drive or walk through it and they have little log cabins along the “driveway” that are full of Christmas decorations and model trains.

They’re so amazing that Santa himself stops by often to hang out! BigBear and I took our god-daughters, Alyssa and Kendra, with us that night and they got to visit with Santa a bit between hot chocolate and cookies breaks.

Speaking of cookies, do you remember that I had to bake about 250 cookies the other week! Yep and it was crazy! haha. Below are just a few of the cookies that I baked, decorated and took to Emma’s Birthday party.

Looks at all of those! Crystal and I baked a tons of cookies and we threw Emmalyn, another god-daugher of mine, a cookie a milk themed 1st Birthday party! It was the cutest thing ever! I’m going to have some more posts up about that soon but just wanted to show you a few snap shots!

There’s Emmalyn with her cake! Crystal made it by following my Frozen Buttercream Transfer Tutorial on the blog! How cute is that?! I think she did a wonderful job! I also think that Emma really, really enjoyed her cake! haha

Here’s another quick snap shot from the party. I made Teddy Bear Chocolate spoons after seeing them on JellyFishJelly.com. I kinda sorta followed the same steps they gave, but to be honest I went by the photo and didn’t even look at the directions until just now when I grabbed the link 😉