A Month of Faves -- How We Do the Holidays!

Today in Faves is all about how we decorate for the holidays. As always hosted by Girlxoxo, Traveling With T, and Estella's Revenge!

I go super crazy with Halloween but I do my fair share for Christmas/Solstice time. It's an "eclectic" gathering of this and that from when I was a kid, when DH was a kid, inherited items nobody wanted, and G.'s many ornaments over the years. It's not pretty but it's ours and I love it!

We love Santa! We try to collect a new Santa every year. Soon we'll run out of room but so far it's working. We got the giant one above in Japan! We have stockings for our cats too. We don't really have a theme with stockings. A lot of people do but we just picked out what we loved and have stuck with that. We've been getting the Lego advent calendars for the last few years and G loves it so much. They're a bit of a pain to find space for and it's hard to rebuild for the next year but overall it's been fun. I love me some wine, so of course, I do have a few holiday signs in the kitchen.

Bad lighting when I took the tree pic but it has a Santa tree topper! I picked up the upper left advent calendar when I was living in the Canary Islands so many moons ago. We put Reese's Peanut Butter Cups in. Lower left is all our holiday cards. I keep the year before's and put them up after Thanksgiving and if I get a new one from that family I replace it. If I don't then I still have a great card from them from a previous year. G and I make snowflakes every year during winter break and put them up in the window. It's hard to see but I have a little light where I have baby Jesus and other animals of nature and Santa gather around. Jesus represents a child of wonder that so many stories represent around this time of year.

We also make cookies for our friends and neighbors every year. We decorate a gingerbread house. We pick one night to head out and see all the houses and their beautiful lights. We found one last night that had a light show to music. You just tune into their station and sit and listen and watch. G thought it was so magical. Then we went for some shakes and pie after. It was a great night.

A beautiful tree at a local mortuary. We had to stop for pics!

Someone had the LEG lamp! Ha! FraGeeLay! It must be Italian!

We also celebrate the Winter Solstice. It's tomorrow! Every year we make candles. Technically we should do it tonight but we don't worry too much about getting up with the solstice sun the day of...we're lazy so the celebrating is the actual solstice night rather than the eve. But we will talk about the things we're proud of we did over this last year. And maybe some things we're not so proud of. We'll make a new list of goals and hopes and things to work on. Then we'll burn them up with our candles and let them go for most of the night. We'll send them out to the Universe and hope we can keep and or get rid of what we desire. We make sun and moon cookies and welcome the rebirth of the sun! The days will get longer. Yay! We read stories about the solstice both fiction and nonfiction and then we have G open up a gift about stars and science. We usually make a small sun craft to welcome it back to the sky!