Christmas decorating

I was so excited to get to decorate for Christmas in the new house. It's going to be our third Christmas together and our first with a tree bigger than 3 feet tall! Zach's mom was an angel and found us a tree for free. It was an old unused one from their ward that they were going to get rid of. Ever since we moved in I've been looking on pinterest (of course) for decorating ideas. Of course it had to be simple and cheap since we can't exactly go buy anything we want right now, but I love what we came up with. We really got in the crafty mood and decided to create different styles using styrofoam balls. Zach even got into this and wanted to try different things and do his own. I loved it :) We made a green yarn wrapped ball (Zach did this), one with fake red berries glued to it, and one with cupcake liners pinned into it. It was really fun doing this with Zach!

We got the stands from DI for a buck and I spray painted them silver. Looks much better than the old rust it was before :) I finally got a collage thing up on the wall in our kitchen to decorate on, and this is how it turned out.

The reflections are making it so you can't really see the pictures. But I filled the little frames with old Santa wrapping paper I had.

Another idea I found on pinterest was just typing up Christmas words and putting it in a cool frame. Again, we found the frame at DI for a buck and I sprayed it white.

Here is the view of the living room (yes we were watching 'The Sing Off'). The tree could maybe use some ribbon or something, but it will have to wait till next year. The cute count-down banner is made by Zach's mom from last year.

Here is the tree with the added star that wasn't in the previous pic.

There is a square window going up the stairs and I hung some snowflake ornaments in it. 

And I finally got around to finishing the staining and polyurethaning of the railing, so Zach put it up today! Wahoo! 

We are really liking our new ward. We are in the Maple Valley ward which is actually part of the Mendon stake. The boundaries are really crazy for it. After a few weeks of going to the Married Student ward, I was really feeling like we needed to be in the Family ward. We switched a few weeks ago and it definitely feels right. Everyone has been so welcoming to us. I'm excited to keep meeting people and see where I'll get to serve in a calling. It's been fun to have bigger families, older couples, etc around us again.