Merry and Bright {Christmas 2012}

I hope you all had a very merry Christmas this week!  Christmas is my favorite time of year, so even though it's technically over, I'm posting pictures of our holiday decorating to hold on just a liiiiitle bit longer.  :-)

I waited until the last minute (i.e.,  right before we left for the holidays) to take these pictures-- we had days of clouds and/or rain, so I was waiting on the sun to finally come out.  But by the time it did, I didn't have time to take a picture of our tree at night.  It's painfully obvious in the daylight that we need a new Christmas tree.  The tree has been around as long as Mr. GI has; we inherited it from his mom during our first Christmas together.  It's a fake tree, but it has real bark on the trunk which makes it difficult to tell that it's fake.  But it's been losing more of its needles than a real tree, so it's gotten pretty bare.

Our stockings hung by the chimney bookshelf with care.  My mom made us those little elves last year, and we thought it would be fun to identify our stockings with them.

Our living room shelves change every season, and this time I went with a vintage Christmas feel.  The candle carving on the top shelf was made by Mr. GI's grandfather years ago, and we got several of the figurines from his nana.

Here's a close-up of some of the details.  The tiny books were Doug's as a child.  They're full books that hang as ornaments.  I got the fold-out card from my mom.  Isn't it pretty?

I unintentionally set up several Santas.  The two on the left were from Mr. GI's nana, and the one on the right was mine growing up.

Thanks to some inspiration from Martha, I made a "bat mobile" for Halloween.  I just grabbed a fun-looking branch out of the backyard and went to town.  Even though it's supposed to be pronounced moh-bile, I took to calling it a mo-beel (as in Batman's Batmobile)... hahaha.  It broke my heart to take it down after Halloween, so a friend suggested I hang ornaments from it for Christmas.  I just tied the ornaments and tinsel to the branch with gift-wrapping ribbon and curled the extra ribbon.

How did you decorate for Christmas this year?  You can read about our 2011 Christmas decorations here and here.  I didn't have quite the energy to do all that decorating this year (two people studying for finals and big projects are enough of a stress!), so we kept it pretty simple.  We're on the hunt for a new Christmas tree, and we're trying to decide if we should buy an artificial tree on clearance or wait and get a real tree next year.  What do you suggest?