Christmas Decorations

My goodness. It feels like the longest week ever. Also, I lost two blog followers! Why do I care? I don't know. Hence the joys and lows of writing a blog.

But! It's nearly Christmas. And I have holiday decorations to show you, which makes me happy.

Let's start with what the apartment looked like when I gathered everything that needed to go up around the apartment.

Note on lower right: dog food not meant to be included in decoration.  Note TV, where Bones has been put on hold.

Among the collection you'll see votives, garlands, ornaments, my keys, a camel, Christmas tree-shaped candles (whenever did I get so cheezy), a table runner, and a half-baked centerpiece.

I've never been to the KMart in NYC at Penn Station, and I have to say its holiday section pretty much blew my mind. It was huge. I spend over an hour trying to decide what to get.  I was also wearing my winter coat the whole time, and got sweaty.  I picked up these pine branches and sparkly garlands.

This is about 1/7 of the amount of garlands that I bought. 30% off.  The checkout lady asked me if I was decorating Rockefeller. Why, should I?

As you can see, I wrapped the sparkly garlands around the pine branch garlands and strung 'em up wherever I could around the apartment.  I got the "merry christmas" banner from Etsy.  Then I strew shit all over one shelf because I didn't know what to do with it.  Incongruously, you'll also see a Halloween card, which is from my sister, which I save because I love her and the card.  Oh, there's also a smoke detector. Clearly I had a strong vision for the decor.

Close-up of banner

For some reason, I was OBSESSED with filling a vase with winter wonderland stuff.  The pine cones and fake cranberries were purchased from Pottery Barn.  I spent an inordinate amount of time deciding between hurricanes and vases, and even went so far as to make Kevin and one of our friends sit in Crate & Barrel for 30 minutes as I picked up various vases and just stared at them, trying to envision fillers.  You know why I did this? I saw stuff at Pottery Barn like this, and I'm extremely susceptible to suggestion. So I have this one random vase.

Another garland for the back door and a wreath from the farmers' market

I strung a couple of garlands across the length of one of our walls, secured by those removable 3M Command hooks, and punctuated them with ornaments from Crate and Barrel.

And, similar to the Lobsters, we bought our small (although the Lobsters' is much bigger) and overpriced tree from a street corner, carried it home, and decorated the crap out of it.

I bought this cute ornament in Kansas City:

And this one, which I put front and center:

My sister also bought one, and we said each year we'd both get one ornament that was the same and hang it on our trees.

I also picked up this little doodad--which stands in for an edible gingerbread house. I can't hang it on the tree because the house is a dense little sucker and would pull our mini-tree down:

The votive holders are also from Crate and Barrel--aren't they pretty? Yes they are, Mina, yes they are.

The table got decorated as well (this picture was taken before a dinner party, we don't usually have place settings just hangin' out on the table):

I also got this adorable luminary set from Etsy:

After all this running around and decorating, I was seriously sore, people. (As well as poorer.) It was pathetic.  It was the most exercise I had gotten in who knows how long.  But it was worth the effort.  The apartment feels festive and cozy, and makes me want to bathe in eggnog all the time.