we need a little christmas.

"For we need a little music, need a little laughter

Need a little singing, ringing thru the rafter

And we need a little snappy "Happy Ever After"

We need a little Christmas now...."

Today is November 18th. I have two trees up, twinkle lights on my mantle, and a wall applique that says "Merry Christmas" over my fireplace. I am designing invitations for two Christmas parties, and planning what to wear to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert in December. My basset hound's jingle bell collar is being washed, and I have plans with my mother for "gift bow tying" lessons over Thanksgiving. I have been compared to Buddy the Elf, and my sister-in-law is planning an intervention (love you Sandra! haha!)

For some of you, this may seem a bit too early and excessive... but for the rest of us....

We need a little Christmas NOW.

Let me explain.

As a recent college graduate and having just passed our one year wedding anniversary, I don't think it would be a stretch to say this has been quite a crazy year. Trying to find a full-time interior design job has been difficult (thank you, HGTV, for teaching the general public that they do not need people like me... boooo) and jobsearching in general carries quite a few ups and downs. And of course, anyone who is married knows that the first year is full of craziness... from the realization that many cliches are true (such as who has control over the tv) to learning the quirks that are a bit more husband-specific, such as my sweet husband's ability to somehow not close cabinets and drawers (it's baffling! love you, Nathan!)

But despite whatever craziness has passed, and regardless of what is to come in the future... that first round of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" makes me want to do just that! So I haul out the holly (literally- I have garland EVERYWHERE!) and have at length conversations with my husband about what theme my extra tree should be (incidentally, we decided on a Santa theme). And somewhere in the middle of all my holly-hauling and hall-decking, I find myself having the best time trying to re-create the traditions my family set forth while attempting to create new ones for Nathan and I! Actually, I think I'm trying to get one too many traditions going- baking cookies together, collecting a new Snow Village building every year, exchanging ornaments every year, adding snowglobes to our collection on the coffee table, going to look at Christmas lights together... etc, etc, etc.

But if that's excessive, it's because some of the best times from my childhood involve much of the same... For example, cookie decorating. For years, my sisters and I would gather together and make quite a night (and quite a MESS, ha!) out of the decorating cookies. We would each have our own lump of cookie dough that we would roll out and use cookie cutters ranging from the generic gingerbread man who could never make it to the cookie pan with all appendages attached to the green Kermit the Frog cookie cutter, that I could never quite figure out how he got mixed in (seriously). As we got older, the tradition didn't stop, the cookies just became more elaborate, as did the techniques to decorate them (i.e. using a sandwich bag full of icing with the corner cut off to create a "finer" tip!) Basically, we make some GOOD cookies.

And of course, who can really go thru a Christmas season WITHOUT going to check out the Christmas lights? Every year, for as long as I can remember, the whole family would pile in the car to check out the local lightshows, where at least once my dad would be forced to mute the radio since all three of his daughters (and usually his wife) seem to believe we can sing just like Mariah Carey in "All I Want for Christmas is You." But perhaps my favorite part of the evening always came when we would eventually pass a dark, unlit house, where my dad would point out that the owner was probably Jewish, and we would laugh as though we didn't make that joke every year...

Which I guess, is really the moral of my blog today. Christmas is all about the memories and the traditions that make life great. It's about remembering times with my amazing family and friends, and starting new tradition to look forward to next year. So yes, I may be an overdecorated, overexcited, hall-decking Buddy the Elf Griswald, but I think that the world would be a better place if we all had a little Christmas now. The earlier, the better :)