I am so excited!   Less than 150 days until Christmas Eve.  I start to get overwhelmed with ideas as soon as I see July approaching because for me this is the half-way mark.  And if you don’t pick your decorations, and make major gift selections now, you will be out of the loop for the “most wonderful time of the year”.

I have a storage box labeled “Christmas in July”, stored with goodies (notes, catalogs, Christmas mugs, t-Shirts, etc.) to have a brainstorming meeting with the family; that’s when we talk about how we will magically decorate each part of the house, incorporating our treasures with new items… so that each year has that “traditional look” with something timely for the season.   We plan the gift baskets and that includes the cookies that my daughter will decorate; so we look at what we loved from previous years and all her new designs … she makes most of her own cutters and designs them all by hand; she’s such an elf!  My other daughter (the fashionista) tells us what we need to be wearing in September, October, and November… as we add more glitz and glam getting closer to December; good gosh, if it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t have my red coat with the shiny gold buttons and my sequin lined cardigans; she is such an elf too… she wears a huge button that says “Santa’s Helper” when she’s shopping with me!