a few of my favorite -christmas- things

i wanted to be productive yesterday but then i decided to be completely lazy instead and it was a beautiful thing! it felt so good to just have a day of no responsibilities and to wrap presents and soak in the magic of the first snow of the year. crazy that it took this long to get any here but we now have a good inch on the ground which definitely qualifies as real snowfall in my book. today though, i want to dive right in and share with you some of my favorite christmas decorations and traditions:



we tend to get a little competitive in our house with the decorating of sugar cookies. i don't have  any fancy tools..we really just decide what frosting colors we want and do what we can with a butter knife and everyone sits around the table to decorate them together. i use my nana's recipe that her nana used before her every year...it just wouldn't be christmas without them!



this knit advent calendar of little hats and mittens has to be one of my favorite decorations. if i was a more accomplished knitter, i would have made it myself but i'm still learning so when i saw it in a catalog (i think it was garnet hill a few years ago) i snatched it right up. after gaining a few pounds the first year we filled it up, i decided to start using the same (perpetually unwrapped) mini candy canes each year...shh, don't tell!




the two photos on top are some of my favorite vintage christmas decorations. some of them are so fragile like the little stocking that i still have not quite figured out the best way to display them. i am definitely a classic-retro christmas kind of girl though when it comes to decorating: big bright lights, celluloid, brenda lee, sparkly old icicle ornaments, you name it.

many of our family's decorations that haven't been passed down come from a place called bronner's in michigan, like the advent wreath there in the bottom right. it is in a town called frankenmuth, not far from where i grew up, and is where many german-lutheran farmers settled back in the day (i.e. my family ancestry). if you haven't been there or heard of it i should warn you that it is kind of crazy and the whole town has gotten really built-up and commercial over the years, unfortunately. it's still amazing though and i cherish it..it's basically a winter wonderland, a christmas city. the first time i took my husband there a few years ago he got a little freaked out by how over-the-top it is and i, having grew up with it as a normal thing, just didn't understand why it was weird. i can kind of see it now, haha, but i still love the place as the old lutheran church, the biergartens, and zehnder's restaurant have a lot of family history attached to them. goodness, i am getting hungry now just thinking about it!

i hope you've enjoyed this little peek into our home, it's fun to share all the little things that make the holidays merry and bright.

p.s. i almost forgot...saw this index of free gift tags on odeedoh the other day. there are some new ones and others have been floating around the internets for a while, but they are all pretty sa-weet!