I am so excited about Christmas I can hardly stand it!  Last year we just had a mini [fake] pine tree, daintily decorated and placed on a side table … our place was tiny and we couldn’t accommodate a full sized tree.

Ava was only a little over a month old and spent most of the day sleeping, completely oblivious to the mound of presents waiting to be opened.

This year she is running all over the place and into everything, so I am chomping at the bit to get our tree and finish putting up all of our holiday decorations.  Despite the fact that I am trying to be more eco-conscious this year, we are going to pick out our [real] evergreen today.  I want the house to be filled with the scent of pine and a big full tree and memories of Christmas’ of my youth.  My dad was a big pine tree fanatic – he planted them all over our property and I’m all for planting trees too – at sites like goevergreen.org you can ‘plant’ a pine for $35.00 – good stuff!

Now we have tons more space and I am going to take advantage of it!  I’m still deciding how I want to trim our tree and spent some time looking at other people’s decorations on Flikr for some inspiration.  Here’s what I found …

via boopsie.daisy – so bright and colorful!  and love the sweet stuffs on that sofa, turning formal into fun!

via craftybeaver – the tinsel tree looks great w/ those walls – so retro!

via floodinpdx – great alternative tree … such a natural look … and i’ve gotta have those lights!

via ATLITW – i would keep this up all year round … genius!

via dottie angel – very crafty, very inventive, very awesome

via Super*Junk – so adorable for a kids’ room … and i just love that rug.

via Simple Tess – so simple and some would say bare, but i really like it.  sometimes less is more.

via matt-pearson – another simple, yet very elegant look.