We have Advent traditions that begin on December 1, so we like to have the house ready when those begin.
There are many decorations that the kids look forward to seeing again.
But decorating in and of itself has become a tradition, too.
This is so much so that the girls were eager to help without even being asked this year.
Sometime after breakfast the day after Thanksgiving, we all get dressed with shoes on.
Dwayne goes up to the attic and with help from our girls, now that they are big enough to catch and carry boxes coming from the attic, he brings down the tree and the several boxes and Tupperwares filled with Christmas items.
We turn on Christmas music.
In years past, we would play our Christmas CDs starting with Jars of Clay's "Little Drummer Boy."
But this year, we actually switched things up and played our Christmas records.
With the music on, we all get to work.
We always have to rearrange furniture in order to fit the tree in the living room.
This year, you can see in the pictures, we put the tree in front of the bookshelves where my computer desk usually sits.
Note: We haven't put the angel on the tree yet. We've decided to wait and put her up on the first night of Advent.
As we rearrange furniture and set up the tree, we also take the opportunity to sweep, mop, dust and reorganize thoroughly.
I take the opportunity to purge, throwing away old magazines and papers and donating books we don't want anymore, etc.
I reorganize closets and drawers as we take items to them.
We have so much decor, that we have to get rid of our regular, everyday knick-knacks to make room for all the Christmas items.
So, as we unpack Christmas decor from tissue paper, we take down our knick- knacks and wrap those in the same tissue paper and pack them carefully away in the Christmas boxes to go back to the attic until we take all the Christmas decor back down sometime January, maybe.
Last year, we added a smaller tree with colorful lights in the homeschool classroom.
It's a lot of work to decorate for Christmas, but the house ends up totally reset and refreshed.
All our feet end up aching, but when we finally sit down, the house ends up clean and reorganized and beautiful.
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