Tidings of Comfort and Joy: Pt. 1

Christmas has been... frankly amazing. Admittedly, I've spent most of it in bed with my trusty box of kleenex, but even that's been pretty great. I'm more of a PJs kind of girl. I mean, I love clothes, don't get me wrong, but if I have choice to go out or to stay in, in my sweats and binge watch episodes of Arrested Development, we all know what's going to win (hint: sweats always win). So Christmas in the King household involves a lot of vegging, but not in the food department...

In the food department, we have mostly sweeting. Before I went to college, and, you know, got busy, I used to spent all of Advent madly baking Christmas cookies. Now finals make a major dent in my annual baking frenzy, so it has to be done on Christmas Adam or Eve. This year I discovered some pretty rad animal cookie cutters in a drawer and may or may not have gone utterly crazy with the cute sugar cookies.

Aren't they adorable? I don't have very good luck with pretty looking food. Usually I'm dishing up some ridiculous looking dish, going, "I swear, it tastes fine!" So I'm really happy how these turned out. 

We also made our house as fair as we were able, trimming the hearth, setting the table, and all that. Mom usually puts up most of the decorations around St. Nicholas Day, so I came home to this:

Those red balls are actually pomegranates, and there are little nativity sets and Santas in the greenery. 

We usually wait pretty late to get our Tree, not all the way to Christmas Eve, but pretty close. We had a hard time finding a big enough tree this year, but this one isn't bad at all. 

Hopefully you can't tell, but our tree is firmly lashed to the wall. We used not to do that, but every. single. year. without fail, we would decorate the tree, get it absolutely perfect, and stand back to admire our handiwork. Then, every year, the entire tree would crash to the floor. So now we aren't even allowed to put the lights on until it has been tied to the wall.