A Little Bit of Christmas Spirit

For the first time in many years, I found myself totally devoid of Christmas Spirit. Usually by now I would have the house decorated, the tree up, the nativity scene on top of the piano, the garland hung on the mantel, and the juniper bushes outside would be glowing with white lights. But this year is different. The piano is gone and there is no tree to decorate in the house. I gave away most of my ornaments, saving only a couple of special ones.  We have been so focused on moving everything out of the house, selling and giving away so many of our things, and moving what we will be needing for our new life into Jumbo, that Christmas just didn't seem important this year. And  then I found this little artificial tree at King Soopers, bought some battery-operated LED lights, found a tiny tree-topper at Target, and hung it with the small ornaments we had kept. Suddenly we had Christmas Spirit! It looks pretty cute in Jumbo's conservatory. We plan on being totally moved out of the house by Christmas Eve, so our stockings will need to be hung somewhere in Jumbo as well.

I painted the gold stars and pine cones years ago, and since the pine cones and some of the stars were too big for this little tree, they found a home in a basket.

I gave our big nativity scene to Rachel, and Bailey fell in love with it and set it up under their tree. Larry gave me this little one on our first Christmas together, and it's just the right size for us now!

Pandora playing on our new little TV - an early Christmas gift to us!

Larry enjoying a well-deserved beer before dinner. We did a lot of re-arranging and organizing in the closet storage area, and were pretty worn out! Not only was he celebrating the fact that we made some progress, but we were both quite pleased that Jumbo passed his emissions test that morning! Now I have to register him on Monday. A good sign that all will be well on our upcoming journey.

Even Duchess was worn out and curled up in her favorite spot... Actually, she's quite happy wherever we are.

We heated up some leftover veggie chili and cornbread for dinner, and were happy that the furnace kept us toasty warm. And when we walked outside to go back into the house for the night, I saw that Larry had lit the lights on the Juniper bushes. I was thrilled. Quite an enjoyable evening!