It's Beginning to Look Alot Like Christmas!

Well, it's beginning to look alot like Christmas around our apartment, at least! This is our first year in this apartment, so we were super excited to decorate for Christmas. We always decorated in Austin, but none of the family ever really got to see it and we didn't even spend Christmas in our own apartment since we were here! We went and got a REAL tree this year, which is yet another first for me. So far, so good. We'll update on that after the tree and I get some time to adjust to one another. This is also our first place with a fireplace, so we actually get to hang the stockings on a mantle this year. Again, very exciting for us! We attempted to string lights on the balcony...please notice the word "attempted." The first try looked like something off of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation...very overdone and tacky. It looked fine in daylight, but when we came home that evening...wow. So I took almost everything down except the lights on the railing. Then it looked like we didn't really try and wasn't terribly festive. So...we bought some lights to hang down from the top that are supposed to look like snowflakes. They did NOT look like snowflakes, so we ended up returning them. In the meantime, I nearly electricuted the daylights out of myself with some other lights, so we decided to leave our sad attempt at outside lights alone and just have not-so-festive lights on the balcony railing. We will try again next year. :)

In the meantime, here are some pictures from our decorating fest!

First, here is our tree. The lights were on when Ryan took the picture, so it looks a little funny. Yes, that is Santa on top.

Here is our fireplace with all of our stockings and our cute new stocking hangers!

Here are the ever-helpful pups in front of the fireplace with my Christmas ducks! Cute, huh?

Ryan and I have a tradition of getting a new, special ornament every year. We got the one for this year while we were on our Honeymoon at DisneyWorld.