Weekend Basics (Blue Christmas Edition)

This weekend was all about decking the halls and calling this year's holiday decorations complete. In order to take on such a mission, spinning a few vinyl Christmas tunes were a must...

So to the sounds of Elvis getting us in the holiday spirit, Mary and I tackled pulling out all of our Christmas decorations (you know, the ones that stay hidden away in plastic bins all year long) getting our Christmas tree, decorating it, sprucing up the front steps with a little diy light project we'll share here on the blog this week and just generally adding the finishing touches to the rest of the decorations around the house.

We literally moved into this house over Christmas last year, so we are excited to be calling this our first big Christmas together in this space while we figure out which decorations go where. I've been most excited about being able to get a 9ft+ tree — something that just wasn't possible with the ceilings in our old house.

And yes, I did set up the tree in the stand in the middle of the sidewalk here in RVA before hauling it inside. That is anal me going — is it straight?

All this decorating worked up quite the appetite, so when I saw Farm to Family was having a half price special on (my favorite) Rappahannock River Oysters and Mussels — I couldn't resist. Saturday night we had a few good friends over and I lit up the good old Weber charcoal grill and got our roast on.

Outside of decorating and roasting seafood, we tackled a few home projects that have been looming over our heads for far too long (ahem, re-hanging the gallery frames in our front hall after painting and finally adding chalk images to our chalkboard walls in the kitchen) and I whipped up a couple new recipes I'll be excited to share — French onion soup and Hungarian cabbage & noodles.

 

Can anyone else believe how quickly this month and year have seemed to go by? I still can't believe Christmas is merely 2 weeks away!

P.S. There's still time to enter for a chance to win one of 25 $20 vouchers to spend on your choice of glasses from Firmoo.com. Giveaway details here.