Getting ready for Christmas

This post is about a week late--so my apologies. Finals hit, and I just couldn't get it from draft form to publish. I will have a few over the coming days though to make up for lost time. :-)

Shawn and I will be spending our Christmas in North Carolina, so we wanted to get a start on decorating. I like to decorate early so that I can enjoy the decorations for awhile. This habit started when we lived in Pullman because as soon as the semester would end we would head back to the west side, leaving behind our decorated tree and our window lights. Since we aren't leaving this year though, we waited a little longer (first week of December) to get our Christmas decorations up.

We started the process on Saturday when we planned to get a Christmas tree. We first went and got some ornaments and lights, but as the snow started to pile up, we decided getting a tree would wait until Sunday.

Getting a tree in NC is a very different experience from some of our tree trips in Washington. I have gone with my family to choose a tree to be cut at a farm, and we have even gone to farms where you cut your own. That isn't the case here. If we wanted to cut our own tree we would have had to go about 4 hours out toward the mountains. We chose to go to a lot where the money we spent went to charity (of course this meant the tree was significantly overpriced) but the people were helpful with getting it on the car and into the stand (even if it was a little crooked).

We got the tree home Sunday afternoon, but we still had grocery shopping to do, so it wasn't until Sunday evening we brought it inside to start decorating. We didn't get very far, though. We had bought two strings of white lights for the tree. When we bought the lights, we didn't realize how big a tree we would be getting, but since the tree is about 7 feet, the two strands are far from enough to cover it.

It wasn't until the next weekend we were able to go look for lights. Two different Targets and a Lowe's trip later, we finally found white light at Michaels. We spent the evening decorating the tree and enjoying it. It has a mix of new ornaments (teal and silver) with some older ones (like Jack's cat ornament--we need to get one for Bella).

 
More posts to come about our decorating and experiences with Christmas here in NC.