I have always loved Christmas. Growing up, I jumped at the chance to string lights with my dad, go to the Christmas tree farm with my family, and decorate whatever we cut down later that night. I am a big believer in Christmas Magic and I cherished all those activities.

However, once I left the house I didn’t participate in holiday decorating anymore. What was the point? Stringing lights on whatever apartment I was living in wasn’t necessarily allowed and installing a full sized tree for only myself to enjoy wouldn’t be much fun. Thus, my living quarters for the past several years during the Christmas season looked similar to the Grinch’s cave.

But that has all changed this year! I am a married man and I have a wife who likes Christmas just as much as I do. Long before this past Thanksgiving weekend, we had joyful plans to decorate our house in Yuletide spirit. However, we quickly learned something when the time came to start decorating: We had nothing to decorate with.

Yes. We both really like Christmas.

Not that this was a huge shocker. Many married couples spending their first Christmas together don’t have a stockpile of stuff hanging around. Most couples, Sidney and I included, need to start from scratch.

This past Sunday we did just that. With my mother-in-law driving us around, we went shopping for stuff to make our living room inviting for when Santa visits on Christmas Eve. After a quick stop at Sam’s Club, we went to Sidney’s happy place…TARGET. Once there, we filled a shopping cart up with ornaments. It was kind of fun picking out the colorful balls and figures that will make up our original Christmas ornament set. I silently asked myself: 20 years from now, will we still have a lot of these ornaments decorating our tree? I sure hope so, because they will remind me of this very trip to Target when we were young newlyweds.

After we checked out at Target, we headed to Lowe’s. It was here where we would pick out our first ever tree together. We went inside the gardening area and pretty quickly decided on a cute seven foot tree. While I carried it to be wrapped up, Sidney went inside the actual store and picked out Christmas tree lights. Before we knew it, we were cruising back home.

Me holding onto our tree as Sidney shopped for Christmas tree lights.

We spent the evening decorating our tree while Christmas carols played. It became evident that we actually bought too many ornaments because we ran out of real estate to hang them. But it was actually a good thing because it meant that our tree was completely covered. When we stepped back and admired our first ever tree we were quite pleased.

This will go down as the first ever Reser tree. We are proud of it!

With a gorgeous seasonal ribbon display that Sidney created last week and with some other miscellaneous decorations around the living room (including a couple mini Christmas trees) the inside of our house looked great. But we all know the inside is just half of the deal.

Sidney made this very nice and festive craft.

Sidney and I discussed that we wanted to go with the big trend of last year and utilize laser Christmas lights. After looking around at a couple different brands in different stores, we were ready to buy a couple of our own projectors. But then my next door office mate and assistant director of video production at CCU, David, offered to let us use the laser lights that his family used last year. David’s wife is Robin, a theatre professor at Coastal, who loves making light displays at their home each year. She went with laser lights in 2015 but is doing something different in 2016. She was more than generous to allow David to bring me some of their projectors to the office this morning. Right when I got home this evening, I set them up and our house looks great!

I think our house looks pretty good with the laser lights. Thanks David and Robin!

So when it comes to the inside and outside of our house, the Resers are ready for Christmas. If you are in the neighborhood, feel free to stop by our warm home. We would love to welcome you with some holiday cheer. Don’t Blink.