Christmas at the Green Home

I absolutely love Christmas--the lights, music, stories, food, you name it and I'm probably a fan of it (except for egg nog). This year was especially fun because it was M and I's first married Christmas! It was so fun to decorate our little basement and bring in the holiday spirit.

I was most excited to set up the olive wood nativity scene that I got from Jerusalem. It had a place of honor right in the foyer.

This is when I bought the nativity set in Jerusalem, from Omar's shop 9/2011.

 I was also very excited to set up our first Christmas tree! In all honesty, I was a little nervous because I didn't have a clear vision of how I wanted it to look, but I think it came together rather nicely. We have some ornaments about the 12 Days of Christmas, along with some of the ornaments I grew up with. In the Pelton family, each of us would get a new ornament every year, usually from a place that we visited. I've always loved that  tradition, and I hope that M and I will continue it. Anyways, it's resulted in some pretty cool ornaments, so I was happy to add some to the Green collection.

(I had a really hard time getting a good picture!) 

A few decorations-- namely our wreath, Christmas Tree, Nativity, and Advent Calendar

The wreath was actually from our wedding, but I just added some festive ribbon to give it a holiday flair (reduce, reuse, recycle, right?). The advent calendar was a bit of an experiment. I saw a cool idea on Pinterest (of course...) about a paper-bag advent calendar, and it was super cute, so I naturally had to try it for myself. I used some leftover favor bags also from our wedding and numbered them 1-25. Then, I put a scripture in each bag to read on that day. The scriptures went through the story of Christ's birth and life from both the Bible and Book of Mormon. I then clipped the bags onto my string board with mini clothespins. It was cute, but I think it can be improved upon next year. Maybe I'll even put treats in the bags! I'm already excited...