I’m participating in the Keeping Christ in Christmas Blog Carnival, hosted by Arma Dei: Equipping Catholic Families, Raising (& Teaching) Little Saints, Truly Rich Mom and the Catholic Bloggers Network. We’ll be sharing different ways, tips, stories and real-life experiences that will help us focus on Jesus as the Reason for the Christmas season. Please scroll down to the end of the post to see the list of carnival entries.
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Honest to goodness, we just got our Christmas Tree yesterday (no, that’s not our tree). In my head, I think waiting until Gaudete Sunday to REALLY decorate for Christmas is the way to go. But when there is only one (!) day in the 4th week of Advent, it makes me a little nutty. Since that is really all we have going on this week, I will share my whole theory on Christmas Decorating. Yes, it deserves capital letters ;).
Decorating for Christmas
My husband let me know something interesting last week. Apparently I made a comment on FB or twitter or somewhere (I didn’t see anything on the blog about it) last year about wondering why no one else uses liturgical colors to decorate for the Christmas season. And someone listened and decided to do the same thing this year. Huh. Blows me away!
So I thought that maybe I should share my theory; someone else might find it interesting or useful. I do need to say, though, that it wasn’t my original intent to do it the way I do now. When we first built our house, I decided that we had room for two trees. We bought a gigantic tree that BARELY fit in our living room at the peak of the cathedral ceiling and I bought a TON of gold and purple glass balls, ribbon, tree skirt, white lights, the whole she-bang. I think that was one of the big color scheme’s that year and they were the colors in our wedding too. The tree downstairs was our old, fake fiber-optic tree and I put all my Hallmark ornaments and what little hubby had on that one.
After we had kids, I decided that two trees was too much work. Who am I kidding, ONE is too much work some years! We also kind of reverted and really began to get back into Catholicism after she was born and I decided that I stumbled upon something really good. Purple, gold and white happened to be the colors of Advent and the Christmas season! So for about 3 years now, we have been decorating our house in just gold, purple and white.
There are a few things that come out that have absolutely nothing to do with Christmas per se, except that I remember them as a kid (a ceramic tree) or a bunch of Peanuts decorations — I love Peanuts! (You can see my home tour from last year — it’s doesn’t change much from year to year!) For the most part, I tend to keep it pretty simple with flowers around the windows/in the curtain pull backs, a wreath on the door, Christmas cards on the wall, the Advent wreath and a few other things sprinkled about. And most of it is in purple, white and gold and it doesn’t go up until closer to Christmas.
For our tree, I continue to put up all the white, purple and gold balls (and bells) along with the girls ornaments, my new Hallmark ornaments for the year (I don’t bring out the whole box — too many casualties each year!), and the kid-proof and kid-made ornaments. And they get to decorate. I do where they can’t reach and they do the rest :).
Oh, and we leave it up until at LEAST the Epiphany (January 6). And that is how we keep Christ in Christmas through our decorating.
Do you have a Christmas decorating theory or plan?
