Welcome to the First Annual Christmas in July Party!

I am so excited about this party - Christmas is such a wonderful time because of the get-togethers, decorations and just the spirit of Joy!! Some of you are ahead of me and I don't want to keep you waiting so I will put up Mr. Linky now and add my post after dinner (it's still early here). Thank you to all who are participating or gathering ideas. I feel very fortunate to have such creative, graceful and dynamic bloggers stop by my little Internet corner.

This little guy is one of my collection - he has such a sweet face. I started collecting snowmen about 10 years ago without really knowing that I was collecting until one Christmas I looked at my mantel and said "Hey - I have a lot of snowmen!" I can't wait to see your holiday homes and traditions!Updated - 9:00pm - wouldn't you know it - computer is giving me fits - so I have to keep shutting down and starting over! I have already peeked at Jo's' and Robin's Posts. These two ladies are very creative and have beautiful Holiday homes! I thought I had many more photos than I actually do, but I think I'll manage. First I would like to show you the rest of that wooden Santa from this morning. He sits next to one of my favorite trees - the wine tree.

The base of this tree is sitting in a wine glass surrounded by corks. The tree was $1.00 with lights and the glass was a gift. The corks come with the bottles.

The ornaments were made by Momma. They are actually wine charms that get used about 3 times throughout the season. It is such fun tree! The topper is a wine bottle ornament that Momma gave me - isn't it the cutest!?This is the Thanksgiving Table- yep you read that right - Thanksgiving. We have about 16-20 people every year. I start decorating on the Veteran's Day weekend so that our family can enjoy the holiday spirit at Thanksgiving. It is the only time that we all get together at our house during the season, as we go to the In-laws for Christmas morning. It's sort of a joke now - it's called Christmas-giving. I really enjoy it because there is no expectation of presents - it's just the family together in a joyfully decorated home! It gets everyone in the spirit!
PC has been in-charge of deep frying the turkey for the past three years. It works out really well because before deep frying I use to slow cook the bird for about 20 hours. So now my oven is free and the bird is just as juicy.
This is Momma's prize Manger scene - she collects them. It is so beautiful gilded and bejeweled and has the most precious baby Jesus.
The library becomes the Angel room at this time f year. I have been collecting angels since I was a child of about 9 years old. Most of these were gifts including the ornaments on the tree. The photos of the collections are from 2 different years, I change things up a little each year. You have seen this before - but I just love it. I also love how the columns look all wrapped up like a pretty package.
We weren't really expecting the snow storm that we received this year, so I sprayed the french doors to the scrap room to ensure that we had a white Christmas. This tree sat was part of my grammas decorations - I was so thrilled the day Momma gave it to me for my home!This year we had a white Christmas. There were 5 teenagers snowed in with us for 4 days. Thank goodness we had gone grocery shopping the day before. If you look at the entertainment center -I have the Mervyn's (sniff, sniff) village displayed. I have been adding 1 piece a year for about 10 years. NOW I have to start a new village.You can see most of the snowmen collection - I really like snowmen! See the teenagers? They are exhausted from playing in the snow. The blankets draped on the couch were made for each of the kiddos by PC's momma for their first christmas.My laundry room holds my childhood raggedy Ann & Andy. And can you see Santa's clothesline?What you see here is Momma preparing for the bake-a-thon that is about to happen in our home. We have hosted a cookie exchange for the last two years. The first year about 12 women showed up and we had a blast. This year people were asking me for invitations be cause they missed last year and wanted to make sure they were still invited. I use THE expert advice of Robin over at Robin's Web. She has everything that you would ever want to know about hosting an exchange on her site. Momma and I put a lot of hard work into creating a relaxing get-ready for the holiday atmosphere. We host this on the first Sunday of December in the afternoon. This year our theme was gingerbread men. So we put together a recipe booklet for everyone ( we made 30!) with he theme throughout. I wish we had a picture of the invitations - tooo cute. Momma did most of the work this year because I got really bust at work - I don't know what I would have done without her. This year's theme is Snowmen.
While I was away for a conference (the weekend of!) Baby Girl and Momma baked a lot of cookies. This was Baby Girl's first baking project - she did great! She had to roll and slice 8 dozen cookies and then she made another batch of a different kind! But Momma had to tell her a few times to stop texting.

I mixed the dough for these little guys and got a few rolled out but poor momma got stuck with the rest. But she did wait for me to come home to decorate them. They tasted as good as they looked! It was a chewy gingerbread recipe (I'll post it tomorrow for foodie Friday).This was the table for the first year we did the exchange this was our table. I was thrilled! You can see my Santa Collection in the china hutch.We give a prize to he most festively dressed and it is stiff competition for those serious about getting the prize!The second year was unbelievable! SOOOO many cookies. It really is a fun thing to do, we serve appetizers and desert, wine, eggnog and Hot apple cider. I strongly suggest this tradition!

Thanks for stopping by or joining the part today. Hopefully you can take away some inspiration for the upcoming holiday, after all it is only 167 days and 22 hours away! TaTa for now!

Mr. Linky was being weird so we have to use the comment linky...sorry.

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