You Taught Me Everything I know About Exterior Illumination

Bill and I just watched Christmas Vacation over the weekend, so the title of this post is a nod to what is still one of my favorite Christmas movies.

Although it is hardly worthy of Clark Griswald, we did decorate the front of our house for Christmas.  We never really done this before, so we kept it small and simple this year. 

On the front porch we hung pre-lit garland we picked up at Stein's.  We wrapped it around the railing going up the porch steps, and then across the front of the porch with a red bow in the middle of each swag.  Then we wrapped red plastic ribbon around the end columns of the porch like candy canes.

I hung my jingle bell wreath (from Williams-Sonoma) on the front door.  Finally, we put interior white lights on all the front facing windows on the first and second floor.

It's kind of funny for me to look at the front of our house.  We always enter from our back door, so we hardly ever even see the front.  It definitely needs a little TLC come spring.  And does anyone else think its weird that we only have 3 columns on our front porch instead of 4?  For the life of us we cannot figure out why a column wasn't put in on the left of the stairs.

Anyway...with this, my December to-do list officially looks like this...

- Bring Madeleine to see Santa
- Buy Christmas Tree
- Decorate for Christmas (tree, interior, exterior)
- Christmas Shopping (We have 20 people to buy for!)
- Christmas Eve Meal - Plan / Buy Ingredients / Make
- Christmas Cookies - Plan / Buy Ingredients / Make
- Wrap Christmas presents (make sure I have boxes, paper, and bows)
- Attend mass (last year we missed this due to an urgent care visit with Madeleine on Christmas Day)
- Christmas Cards - Create / Buy / Mail-out
- Mail Christmas gifts to out-of-town family
- Clean the house for Christmas Eve

Other than wrapping presents, all that is left is cooking/cleaning for Christmas Eve.  Oh, and we have our plan for Christmas mass as well.  My parents and little sister are sleeping over Christmas Eve, so I think Bill and I are going to go to midnight mass that night.  Let's hope we don't fall asleep during it!!!