This Week in Pictures

 

I hung stockings, and

wrapped presents, and

made it smell like Christmas in here, and

the Christmas tree fell over, and

I found more ornaments on another Army post, and

I made a centerpiece thing for the coffee table, and

spent two hours assembling our early Christmas presents, COMPUTER CHAIRS!, which roll and are padded and are SO MUCH BETTER for 10-hour-video-game days than the kitchen chairs we were using, and

tore two nails pretty badly cooking and doing dishes,

decided to get my nails done for the second time in my entire life (the first time was for my first wedding.) It hurt, still hurts the day after, and I could've gone on two Burger King dates with Joe for the price of one temporary fix of my fingernails. And Burger King would probably have involved less bleeding. And

we heard Korean karaoke versions of Christmas songs at a restaurant we'd never been to and definitely won't be returning to until well after Christmas.

Orange You Glad...

One of the rules is Jessi Usually Does the Grocery Shopping By Herself, Especially Since She Has No Job, but we were out of food and Joe had the day off so he came with me to the Commissary. Maybe that's just his husbandly duty and I shouldn't feel grateful for that kind of thing, but I do. I had him with me and also we'd just bought some sugar-free candy; I was pretty much delirious with joy.

We had just left the store and were loading the groceries into our backpacks for the walk home. Then I asked if we were going to get the Christmas tree that day, like I'd mentioned earlier, and he said yes. I said "EEEEEEEEEEE!" and jumped around a little bit. We put on our backpacks full of milk and eggnog and walked over to the PX.

Picking out the artificial pre-lit 6.5ft "Vail Pine" was easy. It was also easy to pick out the ornaments, since there were only two containers of them left on the Christmas Stuff shelf: One container of gold balls, one container of silver balls. I reached out and wrapped my arms around them and hugged them off the shelf and smiled at Joe and put them in the cart.

That was it for this year, apparently. Our PX - which sells such a small selection of things that they don't even carry crayons - sold that batch of Christmas stuff and then quit. It wasn't even December yet when we cleaned out their stock of ornaments. At least what they had left was just perfect.

So we took a taxi home with our Christmas tree box and I decorated the tree after Joe left for work. (We usually decorate together, but without all our traditional ornaments, that didn't feel important.) A few days later, I made more ornaments. Our white-lights tree with the silver-and-gold thing going on was so fancy, it needed something special.

Inspiration:

Colonial Williamsburg puts up these natural Christmas decorations every year, and I've always loved them. I saw a how-to online for dried orange-slice ornaments (slice an orange and cook the slices at 175 degrees for four hours, add a string, the end,) and took it from there. I tried it with apples, too.

The orange ones, want to know what I call them? Orangeaments! I am SO darn clever I just can't get over it!

Making Do - With Thumbtacks!

Our PX has a really small selection of Christmas decorations. I don't think they even carry tree toppers. We needed one, so I made one. Cardboard, aluminum foil, a glue stick...and thumbtacks. See, doesn't it look like it's made out of tin with nails in it, like the outside of an antique chest? Now that I look up pictures of antique chests, it really doesn't, but oh well.

Maybe it looks like what it is, a quick craft made out of a shoebox and some foil, but I'm pretty happy with it.

Just don't touch the back.