It’s funny the things that give us the holiday spirit.  I’ve been sick for most of the past week, and that’s made me feel really behind in terms of getting ready for Christmas — especially getting my house ready.  I still had my Halloween decorations out — it’s hard to feel like it’s getting to be Christmastime, even with our advent calendars out, while looking at pumpkins.

Today we finally managed to catch up on some things around the house, including (finally!) putting away all of our Halloween decorations.  Dan even bravely disposed of the jack-o-lantern we still had on our terrace (ew).  Honestly, just getting that stuff put away seemed to make space for Christmas in our house, even without anything extra.

Then I dug through our storage closet, in search of Christmas decorations.  When we moved here, our movers inexplicably put some things marked for “storage” into our shipment that came here (giving us useful things, like lamps that won’t run on European voltage) and put some things that we intended to have sent here taken to storage instead (like all of my shoes and most of our towels).  (At least, I assume those things are in storage — I won’t know for sure until after we move home and get that stuff back again.)  So, I wasn’t entirely sure which of our Christmas things had made it here, and which hadn’t.

After a lot of digging, I found what we have:  a box of ornaments, our Christmas stockings (which I thought had been among the forgotten), our tree skirt and tree stand, half of our battery operated Christmas candles (why half?) and our Christmas clock.  By the time I had dug everything out, the time I’d set aside for “decorating” was over, so I stuck some batteries into the faux candles and the clock (which is awesome and plays a different Christmas carol at the top of each hour) and left it at that for today.

With the pumpkins gone, the simple addition of two fake candles and a clock makes it feel like Christmas here.  No tree yet, no other decorations, no wreath, none of our usual knick-knacks (those were fragile and left at home on purpose) — some of those will come later.  But it feels even more like Christmas here, and it’s wonderful.