This year is probably the most important Christmas of my entire life.
For the past 5 years or so, I’ve really calmed down my cookie baking, elaborate gift wrapping, and spending in order to focus more on being a financially responsible adult for the rest of the year.
This year, however, Christmas isn’t about adults. It’s all about my step-son, who will be coming up to spend the holiday week with us for the first time! We are both so excited, but it’s also quite stressful. There is really a lot of pressure to make the holiday a great one, since we’ll have a little one running around. That’s why I’ve been working so hard to get the house in a festive mood lately. I knew that the tree was important, as were the lights and garlands, but the most festive decoration is the wood burning fireplace, in my opinion. I’ve wanted to use the little fireplace for at least a month already, but we have an organizational problem at home; the TV is currently sitting in front of the fireplace, rather than being mounted above it. Yes, of course we always intended to move the TV above the woodburning stove, but we just never got around to it since moving. Instead, we’ve relied on the boring old central heat. Now, we’ve run out of time to properly mount the TV safely away from the fire and heat of the fireplace, and have to find an alternative solution. At first I was pretty upset about the alternate heating conundrum, but I realized that it’s actually a fine thing. We’ll just have to put the TV away in the attic so we have access to the warm fireplace. What better way to ensure we have a festive and fulfilling family holiday than removing the entire TV temptation?