Candy Cane Christmas Decorations 2014

We have been crazy elves in our home for at least the last month. My only excuse for the early decorations is that Christmas is happy whether the decorations are hung before or after Thanksgiving. The lights, the garlands, the elves (my favorite obviously) have just been too cute to keep hidden for another month.
I don't know about you, but in spite of my efforts to look something like this with my Christmas duties...

I always end up feeling like this....

Always reaching for the ummmm...cider? Until I can pull it together and look more like...

I'm cool. I'm calm. I'm collected. Haha! So not all the time, but I do only drink apple cider in this house. I mean, we all know the strongest stuff is hot chocolate anyway (homemade with Hershey's Cocoa Mix, yum!).
Joking aside, I don't like rushing to hang my decorations, and make Christmas cards, and wrap presents, and make Christmas crafts. I want all of that to be fun. With everything already out, I can take my time with our cards and work on projects when I want, and bake cookies around all of my decorations and music. Christmas time just seems more exciting and relaxing when the decorations are already in place. As for Thanksgiving, I like seeing the trees out for two holidays especially now that I don't get to enjoy my parents decorations every day like I did when I was home. This year is especially exciting, too. It will be our first Christmas in our house- our new home!

We have multiple trees, so I thought I might spread the Christmas cheer out a bit. With our very large dining room, I could not wait to set out all of my dishes this year. I noticed most of them are candy cane themed, so I talked Justin into buying a third tree for the house and decorating the room in candy canes!

Totally not posed! just fell out of the box like this. :)

We sort of bought the table with the house. The last owners left it behind, so we brought it in from the shop outside and put our other table in the back room for the holidays. I had already preplanned the decorating a bit, and because I didn't want to buy new chairs just for two months, I found these cheap red party chair covers on Amazon. I covered our regular chairs and voilà- Christmas dining room table and chairs!

Sorry for the blurriness! This is the best picture I have from the 1st night.

My elf collection on top of Justin's desk! This is some of my antique picture collection at the bottom!

My desk area- Christmas Style!

We have outlets in the dining room that for one reason or another were placed half way up the wall. It is great for ironing, but terrible for Christmas decorating. I had already planned on putting this tree in the corner of this room, so the best solution was to place Justin's mystery gift (nice & tall to keep him guessing) in front of the outlet while the tree is kept in place! Of course, it only bothers him more not to know what is in the package since he has to unplug the lights every night. Bwahahahaha!

At night time!

At night, we turn on all of the Christmas lights in the house and open the dining room curtains. Since we don't go in there at night anyway, we don't lose any privacy. I plug in the tree to let just a little bit of our inside decorations add to the outside lights!

How about you? Have you started decorating your home yet?