Happy Thanksgiving, Some Christmas Decorating and the Winner of Our Holiday Fairyland Thermal

Enter His gates with THANKSGIVING and His courts with praise; give thanks to Him and praise His name. For the LORD is good and His love endures forever; His faithfulness continues through all generations.

Psalm 100 : 4-5

I hope that you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We had such a nice day here in Williamsburg. The team had practice this morning and then everyone went over to Coach and Mrs. Shaver's for a traditional Thanksgiving meal. The food was absolutely divine! I have no idea how Mrs. Shaver was able to have that much food and have it all cooked to perfection and piping hot (imagine feeding a team full of 6'8 growing boys who can eat more in one sitting than most of us can in two weeks...seriously, if you could see what they can eat at one time you would be in shock. I have been watching it for five years now and still can't fathom how it is humanly possible to eat as much as they do and not be violently ill). Lillie is definitely going to grow up thinking Thanksgiving is a basketball holiday and not a family holiday - haha! She had lots of fun playing trains, ping pong, foosball and being doted on. In fact when it was time to leave she pretended to fall asleep in one of their chairs so that she could extend her stay a little longer =). We definitely miss our families and getting to spend the holiday with them but thanks to phones and skyping it's not too bad and we did have a truly wonderful Thanksgiving.

Now it's time to get back to work! Our Etsy shop is back open and along with that we are continuing to get ready for Christmas and Lillie's birthday. Seeing how it is now officially Christmas season I thought I would start posting some pictures of our Christmas decorating. This room is actually my favorite this year but is the worst to photograph. We only have windows on one wall and there is a covered porch outside of those windows so we don't have much natural light which can make taking pictures a major pain. Everything looks kind of fuzzy and yellowish.  Anyway, here is our family room:

We kept it simple in here and just used fresh greenery and some fresh rosemary plants.

Here is one of the stockings that Lillie helped make.

When I first hung the wreath above the couch I just used one sticky hook and that night it came crashing down on Jon! I thought it was quite funny but he did not find it so humorous! Now there are two hooks holding it up and I promised him if it fell again I would put it somewhere else!

I always put greenery around our TV too which Jon really hates because he thinks it interferes with the remote working properly.

I am missing one of the pictures of this little corner between the family room and kitchen. If I can find it I will add it tomorrow.

Several of the projects Lillie and I have been working on are over here: the stocking, some Christmas song prints, the burlap pillows and the tea-stained pile of books.

I saw this project on two of my favorite blogs, My Sweet Savannah and Miss Mustard Seed earlier this fall and finally tried it! It seriously was the easiest thing and I am so excited about it I am going to make three more piles of them for some other spots around the house! You just rip off the covers of some ordinary books - I just used some I had that were stuffed in the armoire out on our porch catching dust, and then I rubbed some tea on the front and back pages and then watered down some brown paint and rubbed it on the spines. After that I just used some twine and bundled them and stuck some fresh greenery on it and that was it!

We normally have photos of Lillabel in these frames above the wingback chairs but I decided to just quickly type up two of my favorite Christmas songs and put them in the frames.

If you want to use either of them just click on them and they should open larger in another window for you to print. I would recommend printing them on cardstock. I am not sure how crisply they will print, though, because they are JPG's. I am going to list the PDF files in our Etsy shop for 99 cents. I am not sure how to upload a PDF to our blog.

I am not quite happy yet with our dining room but here is what we have for now. I like the sideboard area but don't like how the table looks but haven't had time to play around with it without my little "helper" Lillie.

And here is a dark shot of our living room. I am waiting to take the rest of those pictures until we get our tree up. Oddly enough, as much as I LOVE decorating for Christmas I HATE doing the tree for some reason.

Another odd thing is that as much as I like taking pictures I find it soooo awkward taking pictures in front of anyone besides my family. I brought my camera to the Shaver's this afternoon but only snapped a few shots before I felt weird and put my camera away. Here is Lillie playing before all of her "friends" arrived.


And here she was pushing it back and forth to Andrew and Kyle while they were trying to eat. I think they were probably very quickly wishing they could switch seats with someone - haha! Actually, they (along with all of the boys) are incredibly good with Lillie. It is so sweet watching them. They are all such good kids!

Okay and now for the winner of our Holiday Fairyland Thermal:

Congratulations to Kara of Kara's Korner!

(I did use Random.org, as always, to draw our winner but my computer is refusing to do a screen save/print screen right now! Arghh! Also a quick reminder to everyone who enters our contests - please make sure that we can contact you! The first winner that we drew had a blocked profile so we had no way to get in touch with them so we had to draw again!)

Don't forget to enter our discount code BLOG15 to get 15% off your order if you shop at Dear Lillie this weekend!

I will post either tomorrow or Saturday with our upstairs decorations. The lighting is a little better up there so those ones came out a little bit sharper.

I hope you all had a blessed Thanksgiving!