With the apartment all festive and cozy, it always seems a shame that we can’t celebrate the holidays at home (much as we enjoy our whirlwind Christmas tour); however, with our very first real Christmas tree, this year it felt even more wasteful – enough to inspire a new tradition. From the time we brought the tree home we began piling “presents” below. Some were leftover birthday gifts. Some scores from post-Thanksgiving sales. Some from coworkers or friends. Anything we obtained that was not immediately put to use went under the tree. And we set a date – New Year’s Eve morning – as “our Christmas.”
We had only one free night, the night before, to do our shopping and make final preparations. I managed to pick up a nasty cold along our travels, but I was determined to be festive for our “our Christmas” eve exploits. It was all I could muster to throw on some eye makeup and switch out my pajama pants for a sequins skirt. The plan was to head out on secret missions and pick up a few small surprises for each other. Unfortunately we fail at keeping secrets and ended up at American Apparel buying undergarments together… (Luckily, thanks to online shopping we still had a few unknowns for each other the next morning.)
[H&M sweater, Club Monaco skirt]
The whole thing was very casual. We made a nice breakfast and opened gifts, filled Christmas socks with candy (because we were too tired to find our stockings from storage) and hung them by the fireplace, spoiled the bunnies with fresh veggies and oats and spent hours taking pictures of them as they explored the tree…
Let’s face it – you’d rather look at the pictures of them (they are super cute).
