My Favorite Christmas Movies

There are certain Christmas movies that I MUST watch every Christmas season. These movies always bring back memories of childhood and snuggling up on the couch with my family with hot cocoa and with only the lights of the tree on putting off a soft glow.

One Magic Christmas

It's  A Wonderful Life

Christmas Vacation

Rudolph

Frosty

 

A Charlie Brown Christmas

What movies do you watch each Christmas Season? I'll be back tomorrow with my Favortie Christmas music post.

These are a few of my favorite things!

Just thought I'd share a few things that are on my Christmas List this year!

Ruby Woo Lipstick

A monogram necklace

My favorite perfume...Miss Dior Cheri

 

Rain Wellies! LOVE the bows

A monogram for our front door!

Striped Candles! LOVE

 What's on your list for Santa?



Holiday Favorites!

Come on over here and join the party! 

Here is my favorite Christmas appetizer

Ham and Cheese Sliders

adapted slightly from the Recipe Club

24 good white dinner rolls

24 pieces good honey ham

24 small slices Swiss cheese

1/3 cup mayonnaise

1/3 cup miracle whip

Poppy seed sauce (you probably could half this...I had plenty extra)

1 Tablespoon poppyseeds

1 1/2 Tablespoons yellow mustard

1/2 cup butter, melted

1 Tablespoon minced onion

1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

In a small bowl, mix together mayonnaise and miracle whip. Spread onto both sides of the center of each roll. Place a slice of ham and a slice of Swiss inside of each roll. Close rolls and place them into a large baking dish or heavy cookie sheet. Place very close together.

In a medium bowl, whisk together all of the poppy seed sauce ingredients. Pour evenly over all of the sandwiches. Let sit 10 minutes or until butter sets slightly. Cover with foil and bake at 350 degrees for 12-15 minutes or until cheese is melted. Uncover and cook for 2 additional minutes or until tops are slightly brown and crispy. Serve warm.

** sandwiches can be assembled a day ahead and kept in the fridge ready to bake.

Pinterest....My NEW addiction!

I don't know about y'all, but PINTERST is my new found obsession! It's amazing to be able to keep all my inspiration in one place online. I LOVE it! The ideas are endless. Here's my latest Pinterst inspired project. I've actually seen this before other place in catalogs and such, but had forgotten about it. Here is what I saw and this is what I came up with

I plan to hang all of my Christmas cards and pictures I receive this holiday season from the branches.

What projects are you working on this season? Has Pinterest inspired you?



It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

Its my most favorite time of the year....Christmas! I have just begun decking the halls of our home and getting it all cozied up for Christmas! It would be so easy for us to focus on the world's view of what Christmas is. I noticed last year that I didn't have anything that represented Jesus' birth in my home for Christmas. It is my goal to get a nativity set this year and to also maybe do an advent calender. I know that I want to really put my focus on the birth of the Savior this Christmas. After all, this is truly what CHRISTmas is about! Here are a few pictures of my home so far.

House Projects.

This weekend seemed to fly by. I had a chance Saturday to clean out our 3rd bedroom. It has been a catch all for almost two years. I've been waiting for the weather to warm up so that I could move some large items into our basement and make this room into a functional guest room. It will eventually become a nursery but until then I want to be able to have the door open. So, I now have a bed set up and a night stand with a lamp. I won't do anything to this room until I am pregnant and know what the baby will be. I only want to decorate it once.  I've FINALLY figured out my living room!!! YIPPEE!!! WOOHOO!!! I'm so excited too! Okay, it is a  BIG joke at our house that I've painted the living room twice and the kitchen three times in less than two years. Well, this is about to become three and four times. HA!! I've decided to go ahead and paint the living room and kitchen a color that I should have done all along, Jekyll Crane Cottage Yellow. It's a buttery creamy neutral yellow. Right now my two rooms are Dijon by Benjamin Moore, and for some reason during certain times of the day it has an orange tint to it and it drives me crazy! I can't stand it! I've seen Jekyll Crane Cottage Yellow in two of my friends homes and I LOVE LOVE LOVE it! It goes great with all the colors I LOVE! If you saw my last post you saw my inspiration for the three rooms I am working on at the moment. This color will work great with them. My taste in this house has been hard for me to figure out. I see soooo many things that I LOVE and so it makes it so hard for me to decide on something. But I ALWAYS go back to my cottage style decor. I LOVE it more than anything.  I am going to be moving my toile living room curtains into my kitchen and selling the ones in my kitchen.  I have black and cream buffalo check fabric on my kitchen chairs and I think that will work great with the toile. I am planning on having panels made for the living room out of red and white buffalo check fabric. I will be painting my kitchen cabinets a nice creamy white this summer and adding some toile valances or balloon shades to my sink window and door window. I want to add in pops of red and a little green throughout the kitchen too. Anyone else have any projects going on right now?

Room Inspirations For My Home

If you love to decorate like I do you may find yourself collecting endless copies of home decor magazines. I have storage containers full of them. I don't have a scanner for my computer so I went online to find pics of rooms that I absolutely LOVE! I've turned these pics into collages and have them saved on my computer. I'm working on clipping pics out of my magz to put into a nice 3 ring binder so that I can purge all of my magazines.

Here are a few collages I've put together of color and decor inspiration for my home. I'm working on my bedroom right now and 1/2 bath. Here's the colors I LOVE!

 The next collage is color and fabric inspiration for my living room.

and last but certainly not least. The kitchen inspiration.

Coupons!!!

This week has been such a busy one. I've had a lot of projects on my plate and work is beginning to get crazy, but I NEVER complain about making money. Lately I've been thinking about how to save my family money when it comes to grocery shopping and buying gasoline. I seem to spend sooo much money each week at the grocery store because I don't have much of a plan and I come home feeling like I paid all that money and don't have a thing to fix for supper. I shopped at Food City this week and finally had someone explain the fuel bucks plan to me. Well, thanks to Mrs. Emily over at The Stay-at-Home Mom I have gained so much knowledge this week about grocery shopping and coupon clipping. I am sooo pumped about getting my sales paper this Sunday and printing off online coupons and saving saving saving. I'm also going to sit down and plan out my meals according to what I can buy on sale for the week. I am going to cook every night through the week and on Sunday afternoon. This will save us money to be able to go out for a date night on Saturday! I've always wanted to be that wife that has a hot meal waiting for her man as he comes in from work and sometimes its hard because of my work schedule, so I'm going to try and figure out some crockpot meals as well. One site in paticular that seems to be packed full of stuff is Southern Savers. Check it out! Emily also talks about her savings this week at Walgreens. I think you will find her blog posts this week to be very helpful! So go save yourself some money so you can buy yourself that NEW pair of shoes or get yourself that much needed pedicure!

Hello Kitty Birthday and Summer Hair

This past weekend we celebrated my sister's 24th Birthday! It was so much fun! Here are just a few pics from the night!

Hello Kitty Cake that I made.

Another view

My fun pom poms I made!

 My hubby and sister

 Me and my sister

My sister and brother and sister in-law

 My brother and sister in law

Kelley blowing out her candles

The inside of the cake! I loved how it turned out! It was delish!

My mom and dad! I think Mike was making my momma laugh

Dad being a cheerleader! LOL!

Now onto SUMMER hair ideas. I have been thinking of doing something pretty drastic with my hair this summer. I will definately need a great tan to pull it off. What do you all think of this?



FOOD, CLOTHES, LEATHER SECTIONAL and Bachelor Monday!

This past weekend was soooooooo much fun! My hubby and I spent Friday evening going to our favorite Mexican restaurant and then hopping on over to BIG LOTS to check out their outdoor patio furniture. Well, on our way in they Hubby spotted a leather sectional. The Hubby is ALL about sectionals. We've gone back and forth with whether or not to get one or just use the 2 sofa's we already have. I hate that with the 2 sofa's we aren't able to lounge comfortably together because the man's 6'3"and I'm scrunched up in a ball on the other end. Well, we came home and all we talked about was how nice that leather sectional would be in our house. We measured the room, and decided where we'd put it....we were hooked! So, Saturday we got up and kept talking about it. See... they told us at BIG LOTS that on March 6th the sofa would be 20% off! WOW! We wanted to wait to take advantage of this great offer but worried about there being any left by then. They only had 1 on display and 1 in the back. YIKES! So, back to our FUN weekend....on Saturday we headed to Knoxville and shopped and ate and just had the best day together. We're best friends and since I usually work on Saturday's we don't get to spend a whole lot of time together on the weekend. So, we had a blast! I bought some new clothes and sunglasses and makeup and we ate some amazing pizza at Brixx Pizza...yum! If you've not tried it you should. Then for dinner we had Five Guy's Burger's and Fries. Gosh we sure ate a lot over the weekend! Well, so we came home and started talking about the sectional again. Sunday morning came and we went down to BIG LOTS to check it out one more time...oh I forgot to mention that we went by BIG LOTS on our way to Knoxville on Sat. too just to see it again...LOL! So, we decided on Sunday to go ahead and pull the trigger. We really wanted this sofa and it was already at such a great price. The sales man had seen us in there now for the 3rd time and he said to us...."I'm going to go ahead and give you all the sale price on the sofa!" Oh, my word! We almost jumped up and down and screamed like 2 school girls...but we composed ourselves and just smiled real big and thanked the kind gentlemen. So without further ado here's the NEW sectional we bought! We can't pick it up until this weekend. Now it's a lot darker in person than it looks in this picture. It's a rich dark brown.

Okay, now onto Bachelor Monday....I am pulling for Ms. Emily! I LOVE her! She's a doll! But what I really want to talk about is her house! It's amazing!!!  I WANT HER HOUSE!!!

Exterior Love

All of this unusually warm February weather has got me dreaming about the exterior of my home. We've slowly gotten some things done to the exterior but it is a work in progress. We plan to do several things to our home this spring/summer. I'm so excited about it! Here are a few pics that have inspired me for our projects.

We will also be touching up the paint on the front of our house. When we pulled out old landscaping it revealed some bricks that hadn't been painted and we need to fix a few bricks around our porch.

We want to plant shrubs under the right front window like the ones here.

LOVE the window box here and of course the RED door. We want a new mailbox and stand too!

Another window box! I LOVE these red flowers and plan on planting them in our window boxes.

I want to plant flowers in my two urns and get a couple more planters for near the door.

Want to get some nice outdoor patio furniture for our brick patio in the back of our house.

Love the chair and side table here. Its cute and quaint.

We will be planting some new grass! We need it badly.

We want NEW hardware for our front door.