A trip down Santa Claus Memory Lane...

The Grey house is now abuzz with Christmas spirit after spending all day Friday decorating. It looks like Santa and all his elves just took up residence at our house, and I’m totally okay with that. We started with the nativity scene, then the flower arrangement outside, then the wreaths, then the ornament trees for the bathroom, then the decorative kitchen towels, then the ornaments on the chandelier, then the mistletoe, then the stockings and finally the garland and lights on the mantle and the tree and all its bright lights and sparkling ornaments. This is our third married Christmas together. Check out us as babies back in Christmas 2006. Thank goodness we replaced the gaudy light-up star in this picture with a new one.

I’m still a little traumatized from the Great Tree Disaster of ’07, so I made sure we picked out a super straight tree and that the trunk was completely secured in the stand. It doesn’t make for a fun December when you’re constantly walking on tiptoes in fear of the tree crashing to the ground. Last year about two hours after we finished decorating the tree and were admiring its beauty over a nice glass of wine…. it fell. Both the dog and the cat were in the other room, so it was just a fluke accident.

We lost about half of our ornaments from when we got married (the photo above is from the Christmas brunch and ornament shower the December before our wedding in March). Talk about upsetting. I know they’re just ornaments and most of them are easily replaceable, but I cried like a baby when we were cleaning up all the broken pieces. We salvaged a few special ones – like the crystal champagne bottle my parents bought us with our wedding date on it and amazingly enough all three of our “Our First Christmas” ornaments. But overall, we lost some nice ones. And some expensive ones. We’ve managed to rebuild our collection thanks to the day-after-Christmas sales last year, and I think that surely that was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. Still, I’m knocking on wood as we speak just in case. Here's a pic of this year's Christmas tree.

On another note, I’m considering myself a local celebrity today after making it into the Vicksburg Post two years after leaving my job there. I don’t think my name ever made it into the paper while I was working there except as a byline or maybe when my wedding announcement was printed. My old editor, Charlie, wrote a column about Christmas at the newspaper, and I got a nice, embarrassing shout-out. You can read all about it for yourself here, but let’s just say it had something to do with a pretty red velvet dress and Santa hat I was wearing at our office Christmas party at the VFW and a karaoke machine calling my name. I think there was an Elvis impersonator there that night too. That’s all I’m saying. :)