merry christmas

Between Nutcracker, Covid, working with Sally Sue, and an unusually busy
work season, this Christmas has come and gone in a flash.

One family tradition is that my Dad gets to pick the meal, as our day
is divided to celebrate his birthday in the evening. 
This year was spaghetti & turkey meatballs at my house.

My house is far from perfect (peep the bookshelves) but I'm going to enjoy
coming home to this cozy tree for a little bit longer. 

merry christmas & happy new year!

Things have been quiet over here on the blog lately, and quiet is good :) 

I made wreaths this year!  My friend ModernSauce even blogged about it.

I hope you had a Merry Christmas, & I wish you a Happy New Year!

cheers to 2014!

here

Welcome to 2014.  We have survived the holidays and made it to another year.  Cheers to us!

My holidays were fun.  The tradition of Christmas Eve at my house (aka the old homeplace) continued, and more friends than normal were home for the holidays.  The group is rarely together at the same time, and it's a blast when we can hang out.  It's been a solid 2 weeks of hanging out with people I don't see enough of, and I loved every minute of it.

I also got Chromecast for Christmas, and its been great.  My tv is new, but my laptop is not, so they don't communicate directly.  My plan is to get a computer with a TV tuner & Microsoft Media Center eventually, but I traveled in 2013, sooo yeah.  Now with Chromecast I can stream from my laptop, or a few certain apps on my phone.   If ESPN would work on it's streaming quality, life would be amazing.

Speaking of amazing...I want this year to be amazing.  I don't usually post resolutions, I just give the year a general theme that has ended up sticking and carrying over to the next year.  2011 was (Re)Discover Chattanooga, 2012 was the year of my house, and last year was #travel2013.   All of these are things I want to continue doing in 2014.  I haven't come up with a theme yet but here are some the things I want to accomplish this year:

1. Work on my house.  I did a decent amount of work on the inside of my house before I moved in, but once I moved in, my focus turned to the outside.  The immediate goal is to work on my kitchen, but I would also like to decorate my living room and paint my bathroom this year.
2. Plant flowers.  You know, the ones that bloom and come back year after year.  I've mulched and prepped beds all around my house, and this year I want to actually put things in them.
3. Post for Garden Bloggers Bloom Day every month.  This is the one group posting 'thing' that I have done, and hate that I got all slack for most of this year.  2014 I will be back, so prepare yourselves for at least one garden post a month.
4. Loose another 25 pounds.  I am trying to get in better shape without compromising the things that make me happy, or doing things that make me miserable.  That means I eat and drink too much when I hang out with friends, and I never run.  In 2013 I was able to stick to those rules and loose 25 pounds, here's to doing that again :)

So yeah, the only things that stick out as a theme right now are super cheesey...things like Just Do It, Get 'er Done, or Live Life to its Fullest.  I can't handle any of those things, but when the right theme presents itself, I'll let you know.  In the meantime, tell me about your resolutions/goals/plans for 2014, hopefully I'll be inspired!

o christmas tree

Christmas trees make me happy.  And for the first time ever, I was one of those people who put up their Christmas tree the weekend after Thanksgiving.  You'll be happy to know I was not one of the people you saw driving around with a tree on top of their car, and a fake wreath on the hood.  Nope, my Christmas tree tradition involves my friend Ann, a saw, a bow knife, and a hunt for a tree on my property.

This year the process went much smoother than normal.  For starters there was daylight, no freezing rain, and multiple trees to choose from.  The selection and cutting process took less than an hour.  We felt like pros, and therefore will have a miserable time next year.

Also in keeping with tradition, we did not trim the tree other than getting the height right.  And for the first time, it actually has the shape of a traditional Christmas tree.  Like I said, we felt like pros and have completely jinxed ourselves for next year.

Ta-da!

I think it looks pretty cute.  The ornaments are some that I made a few years ago, and some vintage gold balls from when my parents first got married.  I like it.

Now I just have to wrap presents so I will have something under my tree!

2011 Tree  | 2012 Tree

holiday recap

Now that the holidays are well behind us (and the SEC has won another National Championship) I thought I might as well share a little bit about what I've been up to on my holiday hiatus.

Sleeping, lots of sleeping...it really is my favorite thing to do, and it was glorious.

But I digress...  I didn't do a ton of decorating for the holidays, but I did enough to host the family's Christmas Eve and a group of my high school friends after Christmas without feeling like a grinch.

My sister took this picture of the pond on Christmas Eve

Our Christmas Eve tradition has always been dinner and presents with my dad's side of the family, but as my grandmother has gotten older, she's been a little more comfortable going out to dinner, then coming back to her house for dessert and presents.  Last year we transitioned to dessert and presents at my house, and this year I cooked and we did the whole thing at my house.  (My family was surprised that I could cook a turkey, go figure, this was like number 6 or 7 for me.) 

My Grandmother was thrilled to have dinner at my house, and I think it was the first meal she had eaten in the house since my great grandmother passed away in 1991.  It was nice to see her happy in the house, especially since I know she wasn't thrilled that I painted the kitchen yellow.

I spent the week after Christmas visiting friends who were in town for the holidays, and anyone who was still in town the weekend after Christmas came by my house to get togeather.  It's crazy that my group of high school friends has grown to include babies and puppies, but it has, and I think they had the best time out of anyone!  Little Bobby and Anoush (Armenian for sweet) are seriously best friends now.  Any time Bobby was upset...and that is hardly ever bc he is so chill...Anoush made everything better.  It was fantastic.

Our girl scout came through on the fire (since the ground was soaked), and I have to say it was a pretty perfect night.  (Well except for the part where a friend told us that she had to back to the UK for VISA issues, but she will better be be back)

from @Chandlee's instagram feed

New Year's Eve is one of my favorite holidays, and I have always celebrated with friends.  This year Clemson was playing LSU in the Peach Chick-Fil-A Bowl in Atlanta, and I apologized to the host in advance because I knew I was going to be preoccupied for the first half of the party.

Clemson vs. LSU was a pretty epic match-up, and going into the game I was nervous about how it was going to turn out.  LSU is good and consistent, Clemson is good, but no one can pretend that Clemson is the model of consistency.  Last year Clemson was on an emotional high coming off an ACC Championship, and was embarrassed by West Virginia.  So when I thought honestly about the game, it didn't look pretty. THEN Sammy Watkins was injured on the first drive of the game.  That was bad, there was a fumble, then LSU scored, but you knew that Clemson had success this year without Sammy, and all was not lost.  Somehow the team focused, rallied, improved at the half, and played the best 4th quarter of Clemson football that I have ever watched. (I've watched it about 3 times now, it was that good.)  4th & 16..4th & 16...it was just amazing.

Also over the holidays (but before Christmas, I know this is out of order) I got to spend time with an out of town friend that I don't see nearly enough.  The trip was not entirely planned, but we got to hang out, make a bazillion sugar cookies, and meet her new puppy.

Isn't she cute!!  She's a little sassy, but I think she's going to get a lot of that from her family (human and puppy brothers & sisters)

My holidays were great, and hope yours were too :)   And if anyone knows how to get rid of this 5 day work week, let me know, I feel spoiled!

o christmas tree

I love Christmas.  I love the lights, the decorations, all of it. Since this is only my second Christmas in my new house, and last year I had just moved in, I don't have a lot in the way of decorations, and everything is either a hand me down or homemade.

What I do have are lights and a tree...and they're awesome.

My porch lights are so awesome that they stay up all year and are a feature of my Sunday night porch nights.

My tree is also fairly fantastic.  This year's tree is not quite as epic as last years 'go big or go home tree,'  but with a little help from my friends, I did cut it from the yard, and I love it.  It has a more traditional Christmas tree shape and still reaches the top of my ten foot ceilings.

The comedic value of last year's tree was enhanced by how sparsely it was decorated.  This year I've gone to the other extreme, and most branches have 3 or 4 colorful ornaments each.  Seriously.  It's wonderful.  Plus 75% of the ornaments on the tree are older than I am, which I think is pretty hysterical.  Apparently pink & blue & sparkle was what Christmas in the 70's was all about.
 
The only question I have left about my tree is whether to go all out and add vintage silver icicles to my tree...you know, the tacky, messy kind.  What do you think, too much or perfect?

Christmas at my new house

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, I think everybody is busy this time of year. Here's a quick recap of what I've been up to the past few weeks, and some pictures of my new house all decorated for Christmas. : )

The first event I got to host at my new house was December's Girl's Night.  This was December 12th, and less than a month after I got my keys. Since I didn't have a table for eight, I decided to do tapas and a champagne bar.  It worked out really well, I picked a few recipes I had found on Pinterest (my Girl's Night Idea Board) and the phillo dough wrapped asparagus & baked zucchini fries with sweet onion sauce were a hit... the pineapple jalapeno sauce for the shrimp, not so much.  I had just enough chairs and tables in my living room to make everything work with my Christmas tree, and we had a really good time.

I feel like there was a lot of running around between the 12th and the 24th.  There was a trip to Clemson for the Backstreets Christmas Party, Cookie Day at a friends house, a gifted rug, friends in from out of town, and enough other stuff going on that I don't think I had more than 2 nights with nothing on the agenda.

I also got my first Christmas present between Cookie Day and Christmas Eve.  The friend who introduced me to Chattanooga Auction House (read about my first trip) went completely over the top and got me a much needed dining room table!!  The picture does not do it justice, and it expands out to 7 feet.  It is adorable in my kitchen, and I just love it.

I've started collecting milk glass.  These pieces are from Grandmother

Christmas Eve was at my house this year, and turned out really well.  Our family tradition is to celebrate Christmas Eve with my dad's family at my grandmother's house.  As she has gotten older this tradition evolved to dinner out, followed by desert and presents at her house.  This year (even though I offered to make use of my brand new table) we did dinner out, and then dessert and presents at my house! Grandmother enjoyed spending time in the house she grew up in again, to the extent she didn't want to leave.  I think it was 11:30 before we were all back at my parent's house, and opening our Christmas PJ's - way past Grandmother's usual bed time.

Christmas was at my parents house.  The funniest part was that my sister confessed to thinking, until college, that everybody had steaks for Christmas dinner. My dad's birthday is December 25th, so we have Christmas morning, and then birthday dinner - typically steaks.  My sister didn't realize that other families typically served turkey or ham, and was a little jealous that people got two Thanksgiving style meals in the fall.  Gotta love her.

I'm going to close out this ever growing post with a few more pictures of my kitchen.   I think it's turning out pretty well, and although I really need to find batteries for my camera, these pictures give you a good idea of where I'm at so far.

I'm not in love with the color of the raw silk curtains around the sideboard, but for $8 a panel,  they are great insulators.   For Christmas I put out my red dishes on the sideboard, and hung cinnamon scented pine cones from the other window.

I do love my snowman fridge, and he will probably be up after the rest of my decorations are taken down.  I also love having my directors chairs (or any seating) next to my front door, bridging the cap between my kitchen and dining room.  I think it's important to have good places for people to sit when you are in the kitchen getting everything ready for a party or just dinner.  The rug in the bottom right picture was made by my Great-Great Aunt Marie, and part of my Great Aunt Inez's estate.  My mom inherited it recently, but it looks much better in my house than hers!

     

That's it for now, I hope everybody has a safe and happy new year!!

More tree pictures

I've started decorating my ginormous tree. I love that it's from my brand new yard, and I love that I have made all of my own ornaments.  I didn't think I'd have enough, but I think it's cute...in an oversize Charlie Brown Christmas tree sort of way.

You can never have too many blurry Christmas Tree pictures...ok yes you can.  And I promise to get new batteries for my real camera soon!

I'm linking this post to a few different Christmas Tree blog parties, so if you are looking for ideas on how to decorate your tree (or just get in the Christmas spirit while killing some time) check out these links!!

christmas movies

One of the best things about Christmas are all the Christmas movies and TV specials. I'm such a big kid when it comes to this kind of stuff, I love it. How the Grinch Stole Christmas was on the other night, and I couldn't help but stop what I was doing and watch.  I had forgotten that it is only 30 minutes, but it was an awesome 30 minutes. (That's a good thing, because the drinking game I remember was pretty brutal!)  I don't watch a lot of TV but I'm going to have to keep an eye out for some of my favorite Christmas Classics.

christmas decorations

Yesterday I showed you my ridiculously large Christmas Tree, and today I wanted to show you my Snowman Fridge.  He's pretty much just awesome.

photo taken from my (older) iPhone

Supplies:

• 1 sheet black construction paper
• 1 sheet orange construction paper
• wrapping paper
• rubber cement (or magnets and adhesive)
• scissors
• 1 solo cup (use the bottom to trace your circles)

go big or go home

This week, while I am unpacking and getting my new house ready for pictures, I'm going to post about all things Christmas.  So check back when you can to see what I'm up to :)

My Christmas tree is ridiculously large.  We're planning on thinning out some of the smaller trees in the front yard to give the larger trees some room, and so you can see the pond better.  It was the fullest evergreen that had been marked to come down, so even with it's funky top, I said lets give it a try. 

I have 10 foot ceilings in the living room.

I haven't decided if I'm going to do some more trimming, or just leave it how it is.  It kinda makes me laugh a little.