Holiday decorations and I have a bit of a love hate relationship. I absolutely love how they look and the way they make our home feel especially warm and cozy but let's be honest, they are a lot of work! Growing up we were not allowed to decorate for Christmas. My sister and I are Jewish as is our father and my mom is Catholic. My father would not allow my mom to have a stitch of Christmas in the house! We couldn't even put white lights on our house and it wasn't until I was 18 years old that my sister and I put our feet down and insisted that our mom have Christmas tree that I really started decorating for Christmas!

Fast forward a few years and then some and we now fully decorate our home for Christmas; complete with two Christmas trees, my husband's holiday village from his childhood and other meaningful objects that we've collected along our journey together. It's really important to me that our home feel festive for my husband, our friends and family. For as much work as the decorations require the amount of joy that they bring, especially to my husband, and the memories that we make during the holiday season make it all beyond worth while.

My goal for this weekend was to at least get our trees up and some of the inside decorations done. The eight foot tree in our living room fits beautifully into our large bay window and the only piece of furniture we have to move is small side table! The eight foot tree in our great room is an entirely different story! More on that later possibly? Needless to say we managed to get both trees up, and lit this morning and in between giving our two Saint Bernards baths and other some other errands I also managed to get some of the more prominent decorations up.

I've mentioned how important it is to incorporate meaningful objects into any design and one of the things that I love to do is to use objects in ways that perhaps they weren't designed for. For example I have this coaster by Ben's Garden near our front door that I use as a small decorative piece. I have several of these with different sayings on them and change them out throughout the year.

Last week while I was popping into Whole Foods I came across these adorable petite Rosemary trees. I added some miniature ornaments and a festive bow. Its the perfect size and it smells wonderful, and after the holidays I'll transplant it to our garden and have additional fresh rosemary for cooking. Full disclosure the Rudoplph the Red Nosed Reindeer towel that is placed in our guest bathroom is probably the kitschiest piece of our holiday collection, but it wouldn't be the holidays in our home without him!

Let's just say there aren't many Hannukkah decorations and I'm not one for clutter so over the years I've found a few special Menorah's. This one is my favorite. I love the symbology of the tree and family and this one is made from iron with a particularly beautiful patina.

I am hoping that tomorrow I will be able to get the ornaments on our trees and the remaining decorations up!

Cheers,

Molly