It's beginning...

So, we put up our tree and decorations. This year we made a pre-setup IKEA run to see if we could spruce up our festive, yet a-bit-sad-looking tree, especially the garland. I got the tree when I first moved here second-hand from another family who used it in their business. The decorations came with the tree, and while I had added my own, the garland was still the second-hand stuff. There was one string of gold, blue, pink, and green, and the ornaments were all different shades of pink. Not that there's anything wrong with that...,
So, we found this more tasteful and thinner red garland at IKEA, and my husband picked out the string of silver balls, too. Along with a couple of red candles and some gift boxes, we were ready to go. The garland has been repurposed in my office, where we'll take any festive cheer we can get. Haha. No, really.
Also at IKEA, we got a prefab gingerbread house, some assembly required.

I thought it was cute that the instructions for the gingerbread house were just as confusing and unreadable as most IKEA instructions. For the icing, in 25 different languages, it said "Mix 10 dL icing sugar, one egg white, and 2 tablespoons water." What the heck is a dL? I know like three languages and could probably read a few more, but that stupid "dL" was in all of them. My husband's guess was "deciliters", which would have meant 100 liters of sugar, and is sugar even measured in liters? The box we had said "250 grams." So, I opened good old Betty Crocker and made her recipe instead. And the house was/is soooo cute. We'll probably attempt to eat it this weekend, and it will probably be appropriately stale. The candies aren't completely fossilized yet, so we might have a chance. I hope our dentist isn't reading this. Hi Trent! I promise to floss afterwards!

The rest of the pre-Christmas festivities this week included having friends over for our 2nd Annual Cookie Decorating Extravaganza. We decided that 2 times constitutes a tradition, so this is our new tradition. Unfortunately, the icing was not as spreadable as we would have liked, but our friend got creative with sprinkle stencils made of wax paper.
Of course, this is all just an excuse to spend times with friends and celebrate in general. I'm so thankful for our friends, and most of all, I'm so thankful for Christ!