The decorations are hung around the house with care.....

We have been steadily decorating the house for Christmas since Thanksgiving. I usually have a strict rule against decorating before December 1st, but Isaak and the girls were eager, so we did.

Isaak and the girls also missed having a "real" tree, as the girls said, so my cool cardboard and burlap Christmas tree didn't get hung up. Instead, we put up a little three foot pre-lit tree that a family graciously gave us who moved back to the States.

But, since we didn't bring any decorations with us when we moved here, it was a good thing that we started decorating early, because we needed to make a whole lot of decorations for our tree! Yes, I could have bought some from the highly overpriced home store here in town, but I wanted to stay with the simple theme from last year and strip away a lot of the excess so we opted to make a few decorations to hang around the house and on the tree and that was it.

So, the girls got to work making some snow flakes.

We bought some pagnes because Isaak had a great idea to make a local fabric garland to wrap around our tree.

So Isaak cut a bunch of strips of fabric and him and Sydaleigh, who he taught to braid through this
( ! she was so happy ), braided us a long garland.

We set our tree on a little side table next to the couch and Sydaleigh used one of her blankets for the tree skirt.

To decorate the tree we made some dough ornaments.

And a whole lot of paper ornaments I made from a stack of paint samples from Walmart that Kristine sent me last year.

The beaded stars are from the Ampo orphanage, and there's the fabric garland that Isaak and Sydaleigh made.

Our decorated Christmas tree. We were stumped on what to put on top, the girls insisting that we needed an angel to complete the tree, and me not really caring if it was left bare. But then Isaak brought in a tiny little box that we had forgotten about from last year and inside were just a few decorations that my mom sent us including a wooden angel! It's meant to be hung on a wall, but I stuck that thing on the top of our tree and we were all pretty happy to have an angel up there, and not just any angel, but one my mom sent us. Made our tree even more personal. And then we strung up around the house some handmade paper decorations of ornaments and the snow flakes the girls made and a wreath of paper hand prints glued to a plate.

We set out our little nativity we purchased while in Ghana. It's the manger scene made from a calabash. On the windows I hung the stockings I sewed for the girls last year.

And just some other little touches here and there.....

My friend Ima brought me this little wooden angel from Germany and the girls insisted we buy this $2 nativity, which is actually pretty nice for $2, it lights up and everything.

And that's it. Simple and understated but still lovely and personal. It makes me happy to see so much of "us" in our decorations.

Only one more night till Christmas......