Holiday Decorating!

This is my favorite time of the year and I could not wait to start decorating! Thanks to Pinterest I had high hopes for making tons of new holiday decorations, but due to the size of our place I settled on making one. 

This is my cinnamon stick wreath. 

I found a thin piece of craft wood shaped as a circle wreath. I wrapped the wood with some brown burlap ribbon that was the same color as the cinnamon sticks. Then I tried to lay out the cinnamon sticks to all match up (which is SO difficult) around the wreath. I warmed up the hot glue gun and went to work. This step took a little longer than I had expected because the power kept going out causing the hot glue gun to cool down, so I kept having to take breaks. Once I finished gluing the sticks, Michael’s mom helped me make a pretty bow to tie to it. We made a loop for the back and now it's hanging inside on our door.

Here is a picture of what our door looks like right now. Michael hates hanging the garland, but he is so good at it! We had a little mistake with Bella. As you can sorta see in this picture to the right we have a little table that has blocks on it that spell out Merry Christmas, but behind it I had a really nice vase type of thing that I had put left over cinnamon sticks in. Well Bella went crazy when Michael was trying to either come in or go out, (I can’t remember) but she slammed into the table and the pretty vase hit the ground and shattered. After going to Hobby Lobby and Michaels we still were not able to find anything to replace it :[

 

We got our Christmas tree about two weeks ago (if it would have been up to me it would have been the day after Thanksgiving, but Michael talked me into waiting). We bought it from Lowes and we love it! The only thing that was not so good is that the one we picked was about two feet too big! Opps! When we got it to the house and tried to stand it up (even without it being in the tree stand) it was bending over. Here are a few pictures:

 

Michael had to saw about two feet of it off in order to get our tree topper to fit on the tree. My fault, but Michael is really handy and fixed the problem!

Here is our tree all decorated.

We went to an ornament exchange and ended up with two pretty ornaments! Last year we took one and we got one, and this year we had the choice of bringing either one or two per couple so Michael wanted to bring two. I was the last person to pick so I got to see all the ornaments that were still available and ended up choosing one of the ornaments we took to the party. Michael had a few in mind he really wanted, but they were either frozen by his turn or they were stolen from him and he could not get it back so he ended up picking the other one that I really liked. Here are the two we ended up with!

 

Last part of decorating was the stockings! Last year we found a great stocking for Samson. It is Rudolf with bells on his collar. It is a white somewhat shinny fabric so this year we had to get Bella one. The only thing was I wanted to try and find one that was like Samsons but Hobby Lobby did not have the selection they did last year and I had to settle on the only white shinny one they had that I only sort of like. Here are our 4 stockings. 

We can not put anything in them till the day we decide to celebrate Christmas at our house because Bella would end up pulling down the stocking immediately.

We have not had any issues with Bella and decorations which was one big worry for us. She has surprised both of us and we are so happy about it. She has turned into basically a new dog since she finished her first heat cycle. I am not sure where the old Bella went, but we are loving this calm and sweet little girl we have had for the past month.