Fa La La La La blah blah blah blah...

I need to decorate the house for Christmas.

This is the worst part of decorating. The I need to do it part.

First I need to find places for all of my normal decor. Put it all away someplace for the month. Then I need to figure out where to put all of my decorations. We still don't have a "normal" for this house. We actually haven't put out all of our Christmas stuff since 2019 and that was in the last house.

The main reason being Tig.

Tig is calmer now than he used to be but he's still a one cat neurotic wrecking ball. Chews on everything. Everything. Knick knacks, furniture, his brother, everything. The first year we had them, for those of you who remember, we were barely out of the recovery space when Christmas came along. There was no way we were going to risk Christmas decorations on a barely finished healing leg. We bought a little porcelain Christmas tree for the dining room table and called it good. Tig, of course, chewed on the star.

Last year we finally put up our little 3 foot Christmas tree. But we didn't decorate it. Just the tree and the lights. Tig, of course, chewed on the branches.

And what is it with glass and Christmas decorations? Like pretty much everything that we have is fragile. Tux broke an ornament two years ago. He's our typical knock it off the table cat. The determination he had to use to knock that ball off of it's perch must have been a sight to see, but it happened while I was out of the room. How do I know then that it was Tux? Because Tig was with me. And it was knocked off, not chewed on.

So I'm at the point where there are few boxes inside, a few more on the floor of the garage waiting to come inside. Some bare bones ideas of where I'm going to put things and the overwhelming sense of THIS IS TOO MUCH to work through to get it done.

When Katie was still at home and even when she was home from college we would decorate the day after Thanksgiving and that weekend. She'd take care of the tree, I'd do the rest of the house, Brent handled the outside. It was still a feeling of THIS IS TOO MUCH but it was paired with the idea that I needed to keep moving forward so Katie could take part in the process before heading back to school. Now that it's just me doing it I have to self motivate. Ugh. There aren't enough stickers in my book to make it seem like fun...

It's always really pretty when it's over, so you'd think that would be motivation enough but... I get a few weeks of enjoyment out of it before the I have to put all of this away soon dread starts to set in followed by the THIS IS TOO MUCH of actually putting it away.

But here you go, some of the pretty outside things to tide you over while I get motivated to do the inside stuff...