Getting the house ready

It's officially on, the mad race to get the house ready for the 1st December. The house needs cleaning and the furniture needs reorganising so that we can somehow fit my beautuful 6ft Christmas tree in.  Hubster has tried on several occassions to talk me into having a smaller tree, but he failed, for me Christmas is not Christmas without a big tree. So we will be spending tommorow night moving furniture around in the lounge to find a way to make our tree fit. It will fit, one way or another!

So with Sunday being the 1st of December this marks the first of our traditions...

Firstly the tree goes up in the morning, decorated with love, so many of my tree decorations have a story. I have a selection of baubles that once belonged to my Grandad, some that I brought back from an awesome trip to Canada to visit family, special baubles from my childhood, so many with memories of others, very special decorations made by Nephew and of course Small Boy's additions. Finally there's the fairy, she's a woodland fairy and absolutely gorgeous. I searched far and wide to find the perfect fairy and perfect she certainly is. All this tree decorating is always without fail every year done by Hubster, Nephew and myself whilst singing along to our special Christmas album and scoffing a tin of chocolates! I have to confess this year I'm a little worried about how Small Boy and the cats will behave with the tree! Last but by no means least, there's Small Boy's advent calendar. We decided to buy him a Christmas wooden house advent calendar that he will use every year, we'll fill each drawer with his favourite chocolates, although all chocolate seems to be his favourite at the moment!

Once we've finished we go to Whiteleys Garden Centre to visit Santa, last year was Small Boy's first time meeting Santa and he did really well, never cried once, however he did try to pull Santa's beard off! We have a photo taken with Santa, take a leisurely walk around the shop looking at all the beautiful decorations, maybe even buy some then finally write and post a letter to Santa.  Then we move onto next door, the Whitegate pub for lunch, we love it here, the staff are wonderful and the children's menu is great too.

Once we're back home there's nothing better than curling up together on the sofa to watch a Christmas movie with a hot chocolate, especially a Baileys one!