I decorated for Christmas over the weekend. How you go about decorating for Christmas (and whether you decorate at all) depends upon your culture, upbringing, and personal taste. My husband and I have been married for four years so we are still reconciling our decorating differences. When you marry, just like you have to meld your everyday styles of furniture and decor, you have to do the same with decorating for holidays.
Let’s take Christmas trees for instance. I like a real tree, preferably cut down myself from a tree farm. (I don’t go so far as to want to go up a mountain and cut one down as my Colorado brother suggested). Those tree farms also serve hot chocolate and cookies. It’s all about the snacks. My husband would rather have a fake tree that you get out and assemble - no outing, no watering, no needles everywhere, no drama. But alas, no glorious pine smell! The compromise? We got a real tree this year from Home Depot. After Christmas we are going to get a fake tree on sale. I want one with lights already built-in. I hate putting on lights and trying to hide them. Although we will usually go with the artificial tree, any time I want to get a real one, I can.
Anyway, there are a gazillion things like this: how to wrap presents (gift boxes or bags), how far to go with decorating (decorating lite or over the top), outside lights or not, etc. For me, Christmas is all about tradition. I love looking at my collection of ornaments. I have a couple I made as a child. They are wooden and I painted them. I have my son’s baby’s first Christmas ornament and I also hang his first pair of hard shoes and his baby cup from the tree. There are the ornaments we have started collecting since we met. The 2006 ornament from our first Christmas together. The Montreal ornament we bought while we were on our honeymoon. The Minnie and Mickey Mouse sitting inside a giant wedding ring that we got in Disney World when we were newlyweds. We are creating our own Christmas memories now and we are doing that by squashing my likes into his likes and ending up with “our.” You see “mine” + ”mine” = “ours.” “Ours” may not be exactly what you think you want, but it is exactly what you need.
My husband continues to impress me. Our shower doors were getting stuck all the time so my husband took the doors out and put in a shower curtain instead. It is so much easier to get in and out. I didn’t realize how stressful it was. I told myself that I would need to get a nice shower curtain to make it look nice. When he showed it to me I saw that he had picked out an attractive navy blue curtain with bronze hooks. He picked the hooks to match the bronze colored shelves in the bathroom. I was so pleased. Not only is he Mr. Fix-it but he also has a great eye for decorating. It’s a masculine decorating but that’s ok. Why should the entire house be pink!
