Christmas Tour

Woohoo! I've been waiting for today since the Thanksgiving. You can head over to The Nester's site to see more awesome decorations. And by "more awesome" I mean definitely more elaborate and beautiful than ours. But I love ours just the same!
Christmas decorating this year was a little different than I imagined it would be. We bought a bunch of decorations after Christmas last year to use on our first Christmas tree, but it's looking like our first Christmas tree will be NEXT Christmas. Since we're not going to be here at actual Christmastime, it didn't bother me as much as it could have. And I put a lot of those decorations to good use anyway!
OK, enough talking. Here is a look at our apartment, room by room! :-)
Also, sidenote. I totally planned this post to have the rooms shown in order as you would walk through them in our apartment. Til I got to the very end, and I just ran out of patience for moving pictures around. :-) Therefore, you'll see our bedroom first even though (shockingly) you don't walk right into it from our front door!
BEDROOMI just put up a few random things around our room. Things that did not require too much moving of other things!

Ben's dresser with snowman

Cute snowman

My "dresser" with Santa

Cute Santa (he was a gift from my sister....thanks, sister!)

Ben's bookshelf, with ornaments and Nutcrackers

My bookshelf, with flower arrangement

Pretty flowers

My mama gave me that pretty little arrangement several years ago when I was decorating my tiny one bedroom apartment. It's made it through several moves and lost a couple of berries along the way!
LIVING ROOM
Front wall of our living room

Shelves above the T.V.

Candy cane ornaments hanging from ribbon in the center shelf

Close-up of side shelves

Yes, the would be our cute small trifle bowls filled with some of the ornaments I bought for a small tree. And that would also be leftover wedding ribbon used for the bows! I didn't have any small, clear candle holders or vases or anything similar, so I figured the trifle bowls would work for this year. And I'm already planning on bringing back some of the vases we used for the wedding reception to fill with decorative items next year! :-)

Cozy corner

I love the small metal tree up on the DVD shelf. We got it last year at Hobby Lobby (you will see that is a common theme with these decorations!). It was on sale after Christmas, and it's actually an Advent tree with numbers on each of the ornaments. So cute!

Now for the opposite wall....Lights around the doorways

Close up of side table 1

I love the silver Christmas tree. I got it at Target several years back, and I would love to have MORE of them and BIGGER ones too! And the little pink acorn ornaments came from my sweet mother-in-law. I love the way they look with the white candles.

Side table 2

Cheap green ornaments from Target last year. The unbreakable plastic ones, which are AWESOME.

The tables flank each side of our couch, by the way. I should've gotten a picture of that whole wall, too! Oops!

DINING ROOM/KITCHEN

I didn't do much in either of these two spaces, mainly because we don't have much room in them as it is. And I don't have a lot of cool stuff to do an awesome centerpiece all down the middle of the table, but that is DEFINITELY a goal of mine for next year after seeing a lot of beautiful examples on other blogs.

The extent of the kitchen decorations....cookies! :-)

They're already gone, of course

Dining room table with ornaments

Close-up of the bowl

Pretty ornaments

Those ornaments were another Target find from last year. Not unbreakable, but I love the different shapes, sizes, and patterns on them! :-) Plus, they're basically Carolina blue!

HALLWAY

I found that the door that hides our AC unit at the end of the hallway was the perfect spot for Ben's stocking that I bought him one year a while back.

Slightly crooked view of the whole hallway

The stocking

We still want to get matching/coordinated (non-sports team!) stockings for ourselves. We didn't see any we liked last year after Christmas, but we'll be looking again this year!

OFFICE/SECOND BEDROOM

This room houses our Christmas tree for the year---my pink one!! Ben actually bought it for me years ago, and I've had it in all of my apartments since then! I usually buy a new set of the small ornaments for it every year, but I already have more than enough, so I didn't this year.

Tree!

Close-up

I love all of the ornaments on it, but I think the bright blue ones are my favorites. I bought those last year at Hobby Lobby. All of the other came from Wal-Mart--there are tiny candy canes, snowmen, and Christmas light bulbs. I just love this little tree! :-)

BATHROOM

When I uploaded all of the pictures, I realized the bathroom is one of our most decorated rooms! That cracks me up!

Towel shelf with present and ornaments

Gift box up-close

More of the Target ornaments that are in the living room. And the silver, sparkly gift I got at Hobby Lobby last year. Silver and sparkly are apparently two of my holiday decorating themes!!

Candy cane ornaments (also Hobby Lobby last year) (also sparkly)

P.S. That bowl sits on the back of the toilet. You're welcome for that information!

Second shelf display

Ornaments and Christmas sign

I love the polka dot ornaments...love them! I'm pretty sure they came from Hobby Lobby last year, too. And I made the sign with some scrapbooking stuff and the front of an old card. I've saved old cards for years meaning to make seasonal signs out of them, but that's the only one that I've made so far. I think it's cute!

Thanks for stopping by to see how we adorn our place for Christmas! I am so excited about seeing all the other decorations!

Today!

I have had a fun day today! I've been listening to...

The "Sounds of the Season" channel on our TV

and making sugar cookies!

Rolling out the dough

Using the fun Christmas cutters

Managing not to burn them

Not pictured (cause the process was somewhat messy), but I also made some icing, colored it (and my hands) with food coloring, and put it into baggies to decorate with.

The final result!

They're pretty cute!

And they taste pretty good, too! I just used a basic roll-out sugar cookie dough recipe and a basic confectioner's sugar icing recipe from our Joy of Cooking. It was fun and festive, but time-consuming! And I kinda wish I'd tried to make the royal icing instead. The icing I made wasn't the easiest to work with. Maybe next time! :-)

Thanksgiving Food!

I know, I haven't posted in ages. We've been busy some of the time. I've been wallowing some of the time. I don't like to post about wallowing! :-)

I promise to do a full post on our Thanksgiving (we spent it here, just the two of us) with pictures and everything. But I also wanted to share some of our yummy recipes!

By far, my favorite item was the sweet potatoes. I ate them at dinner, supper, breakfast the next day, etc. We used a Barefoot Contessa recipe, available here. But we added marshmallows on top for the last 10 minutes of cooking. SO GOOD. The potatoes themselves aren't really that sweet, so I like the layer of YUMMY SUGAR the marshmallows provide! :-)

Sweet potatoes

We also made a Tyler Florence "Ultimate" pumpkin pie. Here is that recipe. I did not make a homemade crust. We did not make the fancy topping. The flavor of the pie was really good, but mine stayed too mushy in the middle. I will probably be trying a different pie recipe next time.

Pumpkin pie

Some less time-intensive items were the green beans (just basic ones simmered with chicken stock and onions), deviled eggs, and cranberry sauce from a can (my favorite kind! :-).

Green beans (not as good as my Pawpaw's)

Deviled eggs (not as good as my mom's)

Canned cranberry sauce (consistently delicious!!)

For a "fancier" side, we made macaroni and cheese from the recipe of a cheese shop we went to in Seattle--Beecher's Macaroni and Cheese. We considered it fancy because we were able to get the nice cheeses at Whole Foods, thanks to a generous gift card from my mother-in-law. It was SO rich. And we have left over cheese to use this week....yay!

Mac and cheese

We also made homemade rolls from a recipe I saw through another blog. They turned out pretty good, too. Not perfect, but tasty. I will probably try them again sometime.

Rolls

I feel so behind on posting! I actually started this post days ago and never finished it. I still haven't uploaded our Thanksgiving pictures. And yesterday we started decorating for Christmas! I just don't know where all the time is going, but I'll try to be back soon with fun pictures!

As if this isn't enough information about food, last night we had this Chicken and Rice bake. It was GOOD. And not complicated. We're having leftovers again tonight. Just a side note, I hate how I can think I'm searching Cooking Light recipes and end up with one from Southern Living. Not good for someone trying to diet! :-)

And tomorrow I want to make this baked vegetable sandwich. I just found that blog recently, and she posts tons of interesting recipes. The sandwich sounds so good, and I think it's neat how the bread dough and veggies bake together! We'll see how it turns out.

OK, I'm done talking about food.