We celebrated our first Christmas in Chapel Hill, in our new home this year. And it was quiet and charming and our last one as a family of two. Next year, we’ll have an almost one year old who will be busy ripping into presents and testing us daily by pulling on ornaments and stockings. I wanted to capture our décor before we tear it all down in anticipation of little guy’s arrival in the very near future.

We were among the first to put lights up on our street. They’re so cute that I kind of want to leave them up all year long! Our neighborhood is huge and therefore ended up having a beautiful light display. We spent several evenings driving around and checking out the lights.

My mom got us these adorable reindeer last year. She’s already informed me that we’ll need a 3rd one in 2017.

We grabbed this wreath when we got our Christmas tree. There’s nothing like the smell of Christmas every time you open your front door!

Tucker tried it on before we got it hung up. He said we did a good job!

Our tree was HUGE this year (it almost touched the ceiling!).

Landon also decorated a small tree in his office. I have a feeling we’ll have more and more decorations in years to come!

My yearly contribution to my family’s Christmas is a cookie platter. Our favorites were the red velvet cream cheese cookies this year!

The stockings were hung… but left empty until the night before Christmas. This is our dog’s favorite part of Christmas. And in fact, we stuffed them the night before Christmas and then Bud barked at us until 2 AM when I had to come take down the stockings and hide them. We hung them back up the next morning and all of his puppy wishes came true.

It was a wonderful first Christmas in our new home (we also got to celebrate with our families just before Christmas). We only did stockings for each other this year as we’ve given ourselves lots of presents throughout the year… like a new house, new car, home improvements, and we already booked a trip to a big music festival in Charleston next year. Hope everyone else’s holidays were just as magical as ours!