Christmas in July

If you know me, you know I love Christmas. One of my favorite holidays. As a kid my mother always hosted Christmas Eve. We’re Italian…of course we celebrate Christmas Eve! It’s the biggest holiday of the year for us. So much so that Christmas Day was more of a day of rest. We’d have about 20-30 people in the house. My aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. Even our Jewish neighbors would drop in. Ironically as Mr. & Mrs. Claus. It was our family’s favorite holiday.  It was an open house and dinner was buffet style. We’d have stuffed shells, bacala, broccoli rabe, antipasto, ham, mashed potatoes, stuffed breads, stuffed mushrooms, shrimp cocktail, stuffed shrimp, cheese tarts, cookies (everyone's favorite) and the list goes on. After my mom passed the holiday wasn’t the same and I bounced around every Christmas trying to find that again. I even hosted it one year but it wasn’t the same. Then when Tom & I moved in together we decided that we were tired of running around, that I had boxes of decorations that filled an entire storage locker and that we had no one to come over and enjoy them so we were going to start hosting Christmas Eve. I knew it wouldn’t be the same as my mom’s side isn’t all together anymore on Christmas and my friends are all married and celebrating with their families, but we would make new traditions. We knew we’d put up some new and old decorations and even though we have a small place we’d make it inviting and we have  grown to again make it our favorite day of the year. We keep hoping that maybe by the coming Christmas we can be in a bigger home so we can invite more people and go to town with the decorating. It’s one holiday we won’t ever stop hosting. The menu’s changed a bit from moms, so has the guest list but at the end of the night we are with our combined families and we love it.

The past few Christmas's

Christmas has come a long way these past 10 years for me. From displaying Dept. 56 houses on my mom’s dark furniture with her cranberry wreathes and her evergreen furniture to our house with our shabby chic furniture and our ivory santas. Christmas doesn’t have to be red/green decorations to be Christmassy. You can make gold, silver and white feel just as Christmassy and I’ve learned to do that. As a kid the one thing I never truly enjoyed was our tree. It was a mismatch of ornaments with these burgundy beads on them and an angel. Not that there is anything wrong with that. In fact, it was always my sister’s favorite and hence why she inherited all that. But for me I wanted a little glitz. I’d beg for a star and some gold ribbon but I wasn’t getting that. My first few years on my own I finally did get my kind of tree. Solid ornaments, some ribbons and a star. As I got older and my taste has changed I’ve adapted my trees to my taste. I have never had the same tree twice and I have more ornaments that anyone should ever one. Some years I put up 2 trees, sometimes just one. Sometimes I put up my Dept. 56 villages and my moving elves and some years I don’t but no matter what we do it’s perfect to me…and at that moment in time it’s the perfect Christmas.  

Last  year's Christmas...Hopefully our last in the condo :)