When I first got married, I had a lot of books from when I was living at home. But you can never have enough. What I and my husband (who is not a reader...I know...it's a shocker) did not have was Christmas decorations.
We look back at pictures of my empty half empty book shelves and our sparsely decorated house at Christmas time.
Each year I would buy a few more books. Each year my husband and I would find a great new light set, something new for the front yard, or some great things for our tiny village.
The best part about it all is looking at the Christmas photos over the years.
I got married June 6, 2000. Photos of our home show nothing on the walls, nothing on the cocktail table, noting on top of the Entertainment center, etc.
They also show just a handful of Christmas decorations.
You can see almost like a flip book over the years how my book shelves got filled to bursting and our Christmas decorations are so plenty that we HAVE to take pictures of where everything goes, not that it has to be the same every year, but we have SO MANY DECORATIONS that we have to have some kind of idea where everything goes. Like I said, it looks like a flip book where it goes from nothing to spilling over.
Each year people may not see my bookshelf but that is for me. I hope to one day have our Entertainment room done and a nice wooden bookcase with a glass cover like my Grandmother used to have.
Each year people see every corner of our house bursting with Christmas decorations everywhere you look. But as it may sound cluttered, everything is perfect. People love to come to our house for Christmas to be able to look at what we added, and look in every nook and cranny. They can even pick up a lot of things that light up, or sing songs and have fun with them. Some decorations are now lovingly (well kind of) named after a few of my husband's friends.
At the end of the year when we pack the Christmas decorations away, we have to mark "staircase", "village", "Baker's rack" etc. It makes the next year so much easier.
As the book collection and the Christmas decorations have grown, so has our love for each other. After coming up on 13 Christmas' together, we may have struggled financially, but we always made Christmas extra special. Every item we ever purchased means something to us. We have a real problem when something no longer works, breaks, or is just run down looking. It is like loosing a member of the family. But we scour all the stores to find a replacement that will do that Christmas decoration laid to rest justice.
If we lost those pictures though, we just may be up the Christmas Creek without a paddle!
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