Decorating for Christmas.

 Christmas, I love it with a capital L. As soon as the nights draw in and we start to have fires and light candles my mind begins to turn towards decorating for Christmas. Over the years I have built up quite a collection of decorations. I love quite traditional glass ornaments which sparkle and twinkle when the lights hit them.
Working in The Arbour just makes it all the more exciting because we always buy items that really appeal to us. When the girls are not looking I try and sneak some of the lovely decorations home( I do pay for them!) but they tell their Father, and he insists we have more than enough.
This year we have lovely frosted glass acorns and cones. I love how you can just place a few in a glass dish or hang them off some mantelpiece greenery with some fairy lights weaving in and out and as they twist and spin in the firelight they give off little rainbows.

Having said all that I also love wooden decorations. I find American "olde world" items really cute. I especially love to put them up in the kitchen. I have a large wooden angel that hangs off one of the beams watching over all our festivities.

We tend to have two trees, I would do three or four if I could get away with it! We have the main real fir in our sitting room, which we go and choose from Fillingham Castle. I love how they allow you to go and wander through the trees and choose your own. When we eventually get it back home and my husband  has wrestled it all through the house and finally gets it into position I love to dress it with all my glass ornaments. Years ago I came across some lovely glass nutcrackers, they always hang off the highest branches as the first to be hung, then it's a bit of a free for all. Sometimes my "it's got to look right" tendency has meant I need to go back when the children are in bed and move some of the decorations around, sad I know, but there you go!
 The tree in the dinning room is one I inherited from my parents when they decided they were to old to keep putting up a tree especially as they always came down to us for Christmas, love them to bits but I hope I don't ever feel like this. To be fair they have now moved down next door to us and did have a tree last year. This tree is much more child friendly, lots of wooden decorations and chocolates.

I love to make sure each room has something Christmassy in it. And while I do love to have some fresh flowers( often beautiful cream roses) I am much more drawn to lots of winter greenery. All lit up with fairy lights and usually surrounding a Nativity scene to remind us about the true meaning of Christmas.