When it comes to Christmas time I love to decorate. I spent in one year over $250.00 just in decorations and I use these decorations every year.

We have a 7 foot tall pre-lit Christmas tree that takes up almost one room in our little home. Once we put it up, we almost don’t want to put ornaments on it because it is pretty enough with all the lights that are already on it, but we do anyway.

We like to take plain white lights and decorate the front of our house; we live in southern Florida so Christmas is a strange time anyway having warm temps when you are use to snow and cold.

The clear lights seem to add the allusion of ice on the roof tops of the house and gives us the Christmas feel. When it comes to the inside, we have stockings that we hang for our dogs since we have no children to hang them for.

We also have ceramic manger scenes that we set out as well as the Nut Craker statues that are used to crack nuts. We set a small sleigh in the center of our kitchen table and fill with fruit as well as colored place mats.

We hang a beautiful wreath on the front door that is decorated with clear lights as well to give the feeling of ice hanging to. We try to put out dish towels that are Christmas oriented and are very cheerful to. We also have one of them globes that you plug in and they inflate and have snow blowing around inside of it with a winter scene inside such as a snowman and a couple of presents.

We also take plain boxes and wrap them and make them look like gifts and we place them around the house and under the tree. When it came time to buy new decorations I like to go to discount stores and buy them and I also wait till the end of the season and purchase things when they are discounted or put on clearance.

I remember our very first Christmas together was a sad time of the year for us, it was my first one without my mother and my partner almost died during the Christmas season a few years before, so that time of year brought back bad memories for him.

We went out and bought a live tree and put it up in our condo that we lived in at the time, which this was 9 years ago. We had one dog at the time and she was like our child, so we treated her as such buying her gifts and things like that.

We took pictures of my mother and we set them out with some decorations around them making it feel like she was there and celebrating the holiday season with us. We had put out a few decorations that were hers as well and it added to the mood of her being there.

We didn’t spend a lot on gifts for each other that year because we were just thankful that we had each other and someone to spend the holiday with and just to be thankful to be alive and well. We took plenty of pictures to start our own memories of Christmas together, and every year we do the same adding something new each year.

That was a very wonderful and beautiful Christmas and one that I will always remember as long as I am permitted to live here on this earth. We still get a little emotional when that time of year rolls around, but we just step back and are thankful for another year together and another year that we have to celebrate the jolly time of year, and now we have 2 dogs that we celebrate with, one is still the one we had 9 years earlier. She is getting older, but we are thankful that we have been blessed to have her another year with us and we will cherish the time that we have left with her, because we never know if this one may be the last.