I love decorating my house, but I especially love changing around the decor for Christmas.  When we bought our current house two years ago, we had very little in the way of decorations since we never bothered to do much beyond putting up a small tree in the various rentals we occupied previously.  But now I have a dining room and a huge mantle in the living room, plus space for a big tree and in my head I see visions of garlands flowing and Christmas cheer peaking out from every corner.

Too bad Christmas decorations are so expensive…

So this is my plan: every year, add just a bit more and eventually we’ll have a nice array of beautiful things for the holidays.

Now I’m not done with my decorating for Christmas 2010, but I thought I’d give you a sneak peek at what I’ve been up to.

Here is the dining room centerpiece (I just have to get some taper candles to put in my candle stick holders):

As you can see, my knock off Pottery Barn paper music stars mixed in nicely with the Christmas ball ornaments from last year:

After I ran out of steam getting the tree up and completing the dining room centerpiece, last year’s mantle ending up being a bit bare.  This year, I thought we’d spruce things up a bit… literally… those are the bottom branches trimmed from our blue spruce Christmas tree you see behind the nativity:

So with the mantle done and the dining room centerpiece nearly done, I think I’ll tackle just one more new thing this year and that is the console table behind the couch in the living room.  Here’s how far I’ve gotten:

It’s like a design blank slate and all of these ideas are floating around in my head… which way to go?  So hard to choose just one idea.