Early Christmas decoration!

I am writing today about how the Martin’s decorate Christmas. When we used to live in the States I decorated Christmas right after Thanksgiving. Even when we moved back here to the Philippines. In the States before it would take me a few days to finished up my decorations. I usually decorate the whole house. You know to keep up with the lifestyle there. At first we did have the live Christmas tree there (before me and Chris got the allergy problem).  We usually went to a friends farm there and found the Douglas fir tree (I think that’s the name of  the kind of Christmas tree that we like). It was really fun looking at the perfect tree for us.

When Chris was about 3 years old we discovered that he was allergic to Christmas trees, so we immediately then switched to an artificial Christmas tree. I know that Bob hated it but nothing we could do about it. So ever since then we’re using the artificial tree. We brought the tree we had in the States with us to the Philippines. Still good and usable. We still like it a lot. This year we started decorating the house before Thanksgiving time. The kids kind of wanted an early decor, and I gave in. Hmm, softy mom I guess. As you can see on the photo our tree is loaded with the Christmas ornaments. Most of it we brought with us from the States. I just let the kids put the ornaments everywhere they want to put it. Usually I have to say where they have to put it. A lot of the ornaments of the tree were from Bob when he was a kid. Him and his parents made it. So our kids had some ornaments that was made and was bought also every year when they were growing up. We might be making some this year too with Jean Jean being not having when she’s born and growing up. It would be a new thing for her. This year to decorate it just took us 2 days to decorate even not a whole day affair.

We changed a lot this year too. We didn’t put too many lights in the tree. My usual lights would be not less than 5,000 pieces. We have time before that I put almost 10k of lights in the tree. But being here in the Philippines somehow I run into problems when I put too many lights though in the Christmas tree. So we decided this year just put like around 500 pieces at the most. It works pretty good so far. So this might be a forever thing for us, just have lesser lights on our tree.

I also have some Dickens village that I have in my collections in the States over the years of living there. I am hoping that one of my kids will have the interest to do it so that I can just watched and enjoy the village. Some of the stuff are missing and some have chip already. But its okay it still looks good for us. Most of the my collection were already none existence (retired already). I was just looking at the Department 56 website, wow they got lots of good stuff now too. But I’m happy of what I already had. No place for new stuff anymore. I had now put up our Christmas tree upstairs just near the Dickens Village. My kids really enjoyed just sitting down in the couch and looking at the village and the Christmas tree lit up.

Bob also had some good collections. It’s the monks I have to check if they were made by department 56, not sure of that though. Bob saw it at his mom’s house one day before Christmas and he told his mom that he likes it. So mom bought it for him I think on his birthday. The monks really are cute. Good collections from my dear hubby.

While your reading this column it’s the day before  Thanksgiving Day in the States. So Happy Thanksgiving to all Americans all over the world.

Happy Turkey to all!