There is a rule in our house, no decorating until December 1st. Which means when December 1st comes along, a Christmas bomb goes off, and that bomb’s name is Suzi. 😉
Last Monday I had 6 classes to teach, but my number one concern was, “When am I going to have time to decorate for Christmas!?!?”. Never fear, where there is a will, there is a way. Between 4:30 and 5:30 I put up our outside lights (which I still haven’t plugged in, what a dork), decorated the entire house (fortunately for me, our house is small) and had put up our small 3 foot tree that is upstairs on our pellet stove (the top of a pellet stove does’t get hot like a wood stove). Then I went and taught two more fitness classes and came home and started putting up our main tree around 10:00pm. It’s called dedication. 😉
That right there is a 7 foot pre-lit tree, with two extra sets of lights (I like lights), 40 feet of ribbon, 20 bows, 80 plain gold ornaments, 20 sports ornaments (as you can see our tree is in our sports/media room), and then tops off with somewhere between 50-100 other ornaments we’ve been given or collected over the years (I like ornaments).
I remember years and years ago before I had the gold and the sports themed “starter” ornaments, J would come in as I decorated the tree and kept saying, “There are enough ornaments on that tree, you should stop.” What a guy. In those days our tree had maybe 75 ornaments total on it. Now we are closer to 200 and he doesn’t even bother opening his mouth, either he’s resigned himself to the fact that I am compelled to over decorate, or he’s come to the dark side. I like to think it’s the later.
When I finished the tree I of course instagrammed it, and then followed that up with a very important announcement. That for the month of December, I will be taking Olaf along with me on adventures.
Why? Partly because I’m insane, but mostly to help relieve us all from those dang elf on a shelf posts. Everyone has agreed that Olaf is much more adorable, and so far folks have been loving his adventures!
He’s gone to exercise class, spent an evening in drinking tea, made a cake, went out for lunch, made snow angels, and last night went to a concert! If you’re not following me on Instagram or Facebook you’re missing out on all the fun so click over to one (or both) and follow me (and catch up on his adventures last week)!
You should notice how wonderfully empty it is under the tree in the photos above, and then check out this photo taken Tuesday afternoon…
It looks like I’ve finished al my shopping and wrapping doesn’t it? Don’t be deceived, those boxes are all empty. Yes empty. I wrapped up a whole pile of empty boxes to create a barricade to keep one grey kitty away from the tree. Why? Because she insists on chewing on it. Pekoe on the other hand is content to just hang out under the tree like a good kitty
but Ollie is not. Here she is devising her plan of attack. So far she has penetrated the wall of boxes at least 3 times. So bad!
Between decorating and wrapping empty boxes I did still work last week, the weather has been nutty so there has been lots of tea (from my David’s Tea advent calendar!) and Chai Tea Lattes to keep me toasty warm
but more importantly, our pellet stove is up and running!!! I’ll spare you the long saga as to what took so long to get it going this fall/winter, but the important things is that it is running!! We are pretty darn excited!
This weekend I finally had a change to check out this cookbook that was sent to me a few weeks back
Let the #holiday planning begin! @RobertRoseBooks #recipes #christmas #yum pic.twitter.com/9Yg5LhfI2E
— Suzi Fevens (@suziconfesses) November 17, 2014
What I really like about it, is that it’s like those cookbooks you get from fundraisers. The ones where everyone contributes their favourite recipes and they get complied into one. Those are the best cookbooks around, and this is just like one of those. There are countless amazing sounding recipes and one of the ones I made was spiced pecans
They were super easy and would make an amazing gift if you bottles them up in a cute container. These ones aren’t going to make into a gift though,
because I’ve already eaten them. All. So yeah… they are yummy. If you are in the market for a new Christmas cookbook definitely check this one out.
I’ve also been up to some Christmas-y crafty business, but for obvious reasons I can’t talk about that…
This week is my last week of craziness before the holidays, I’ve got a full 17 classes (whaaaaa) to teach, and then the following week I’m down to 10 before my long awaited 2 week vacation starts. I’m like crazy excited for the 19th to arrive! I love what I do, but it’s going to be soon nice to have a two week break!