It's Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas

Today I spent the whole day cleaning my house up so I could get my Christmas stuff out. Normally, we wait to put the tree up after my birthday (this coming week), however, I felt the need to put it up today. First thing I did was clean the beams off. Here is how they look all year.

I have a tin can collection on the one side and a bottle collection on the other side of the room. For Christmas my tins come down and my nutcrackers go up. It's become a tradition in my family that I get one nutcracker a year. My mom started it about 12 years go now. I have only 10 in the picture... it took me a while to find number 11. After that ( yes, it took a while!) I had to get the spot for our tree ready. Here's the corner where it will go before I cleaned it. Here's the tree in it's box. This is the first year we have used this tree.

Here the tree standing. I just finished trimming it, but this pict I took before I trimmed it! Looks pretty good!