Hello! The Advent of our Lord is upon us! And currently, I'm in bed with some weird stomach bug/food poisoning grossness. I'm praying it's one of those blessed 12 or 24 hour miracle bugs that does it's awful business and then leaves my house in peace. Praying praying praying.
I'm not jumping into the "how early is too early to pull out the Christmas decorations?" fracas because my own reasons for holding off are completely non-liturgical: I just cannot stand the the stockings, Santas and snowmen getting a fine layer of DUST on them before the Christmas Eve. Dusting and cleaning are depressing enough without having to dust and clean the stuff you pull out of the closet each year to MAKE EVERYONE HAPPY!!!
So, family rule is that it all the tinsel comes out and the tree goes up on the 2nd or 3rd Sunday of Advent, and then comes down by Epiphany, all dusty and sad. But by then I don't care as much.
Here are 7 things I'm loving at home this month:
1. Budget friendly Christmas card photos
We only had to take 4,000 photos to get a good one! This was shot 3,403. We were still warming up.
I had grand plans to hire a photographer and have a big ol' family photo shoot with my family (three sisters, two sons-in-law, two grandparents and nine grandkids under the age of eight).
Yeah. That didn't come together. But instead we went to a nearby park with benches and this
little gadget with a remote shutterfly, and it went pretty darn well:
I plan on just taking one of the photos of Sean and I with our kids, embellishing it with a little photoshop magic, then printing them for like .09 cents or something at Costco. Done and done cheaply.
2. Cheap frames for kid art
So many times I've tried to sneak one of my dear kid's masterpieces into the recycling bin (after the proper period of admiration and praise for their aesthetic sense, of course), only to have them see the smallest corner of it sticking out and scream HEY, I WANTED TO KEEP THAT!!
Since this is the season of 9,000 art projects, I picked up a 3-pack of these cute 8x10 pop-in front loader frames from Walmart for $5.97. I can only find the link to the
3-pack of 11x17 frames online, but still, at $11.56 for three, that's pretty good.
3. Free foliage
My rose bushes and
nandinas start to quake when they see me head outside with the scissors.
As much as I love having fresh flowers in my home and on my table, I still have a hard time biting the $5 bullet to buy a cut arrangement at the store. It's a thrill to go see what I have outside in the yard, instead.
3. My Dollar Store Advent wreath.
This year I'm using little $1 candlestick holders, prickly evergreen branches, and candles my mom picked up for me because I forgot to buy my own!! (Thanks, Mom.)
4. Advent music that sounds like Christmas music
I've had this album,
Hymns, on repeat for weeks now. It's free on Amazon Prime Music. Beth Neilsen Chapman's voice has a way of taking
Catholic classics (many of them in Latin) and making them sound lush and festive with nary a whiff of misplaced-Chrsitmas cheer.
Bonus: I play it in the afternoons when the kids are going bonkers and supposed to be doing their homework, and it smokes the bees, as they say. Lifesaver.
6. Toy purge
Something about knowing that in influx of NEW STUFF (which I myself am buying at a ridiculous speed) will be descending into our home in a few weeks at Christmas makes me want to clean out all the closets. I've been going room to room with paper grocery bags, trying to furtively trash all of the broken-past-fixing items that have accrued since we moved.
Hint: Doing this purge while the 5 year old is present makes it 91% less effective.
7. Always always always shop Amazon Warehouse Deals
It's just second nature anymore, but for any item I'm searching for on Amazon (most especially toys or household goods), I look for it in the Warehouse Deals dept. first. A little tutorial for mobile users:
Buying something from the Warehouse Deals means sacrificing the pristine beauty of opening the original packing of an item yourself. But if that's no big deal, then there are deep savings to be had--usually about 30-50% off of Amazon's original prices.
Blessed Advent to us all!