I love decorating our house for the seasons, mostly because it keeps me from renovating our house, which would be much more disruptive and expensive. I get bored quickly with an unchanging environment – as does the natural world around here, I might add. However, I am also attuned to the church calendar, the liturgical seasons; and this affects my decorating efforts.

I don’t put out springtime decorations until after Easter, because they are too jarring for me during Lent and Holy Week.

I’ve talked now with people from a couple of households who told me they have been feeling so low these days, that they are putting out some Christmas items now, to make their homes feel more cheerful. (Since I am a Decor Hussy, naturally I’ll keep my Pumpkintide items out through Thanksgiving.)

Personally, I struggle with how to decorate the house during Advent and Christmas. In my particular religious tradition, no Christmas decorations show up until Christmas Eve, and then they remain up through Epiphany. However, the Divine Spirit also gave me a wonderful family to love who look forward to seeing some Christmas items before late December, and so we do put some Christmas things up before December 24, and yes that includes secular decorations as well as religious ones. (We also take most of it down on New Year’s Day instead of waiting until Epiphany, because that’s when I can rope out-of-town family guests into taking down the tree with me.)

However. Much like I can’t look at secular Easter stuff in my house during Lent and Holy Week, I don’t want to see stockings or Santa until it’s quite close to December 25.

Recently I sorted through our seasonal decorations to see what I could donate to the thrift shop, which has already put Christmas items out. In the process I ended up reorganizing the boxes. Enter the Advent box of decorations.

On the weekend after Thanksgiving, now that I’ve reorganized our boxes, we’ll be putting out our Advent wreath, and decorative items related to the natural world. Stars. Cute little wooden trees. Candles. A wooden Advent calendar with a hedgehog slider in a Maine-style winter hat, that glides along a strip of wood marked with dates from 1-25. A little gnome my daughter got for me when she was living in Finland.

I can hardly wait.