My niece and my niece-in-law…

Friends from church, with a view of the cookie table…

Our friends on the right came to our rescue at 11pm, the night before the open house, because a leg on the stand for our 9′ nativity tree had broken. My sister was holding the tree upright, DH was scouring the attic for another stand big enough to hold the tree. They rushed over in their jams, helped DH lift the tree and it slipped right into the new stand. Crisis averted! Thanks, Shawn and Melissa! Friends in need, friends indeed!

DD and friends, enjoying her room…

Sweet, godly women…on the left, a dear friend…on the right, one of three wonderful friends, one being my sister, who came at 9:00 Saturday morning and cleaned our house until 5:00 that afternoon. I would never make it without their help!

Among the yummy treats…are these not the cutest little guys?

Delicious, these Holiday Petits Fours are a must have…

And the Sour Cream Sugar Cookies are, of course, a staple…

We do a lot of decorating for Christmas…understatement, I know… Here are a few pictures to whet your appetite for more.

The old armoire, finished off with fresh greenery…

In the upstairs bath…

Dining room cupboard…

Living room mantel…

Downstairs bath…

Laundry room…

Liberian nativity in the library…

I’m working on a Christmas house tour post, so will save the rest of the pictures for that. I hope you enjoyed this little peek at our open house party. I’m already making notes for next year’s event! ~~Rhonda

Living room

A gaggle of great guys in the living room.

And time to catch up with friends.

Dining room, with the table pushed against the south wall.

Library / family room, with "It’s a Wonderful Life" on the TV. The stained glass windows were made by our dear friend Gary.

Used to be the “office,” now it’s sort of called the music room, for want of a better name. It’s where the piano lives.

Addition hall, looking toward the guest room.

Guest room, with a few extra chairs for chatty guests.

Upstairs hall…these are the last walls in the house that need to be repainted. Those dull vanilla walls don’t jibe will with all the color in the rest of the house.

Speaking of color…DD#3′s room…

My crafting/scrapbooking room

DD#1′s room

Looking from our bedroom door toward DD#2′s room.

DD#2′s room

The "glass" tree in our bedroom. All the ornaments are made of glass. The tree has more than 250 prisms and crystal bead chains from old chandeliers.

That’s a quick overview of the decorating, though we missed the kitchen. I need to take more pictures for a detailed tour. And I still wish we’d taken more pictures of the guests!

This morning we woke to a very light dusting of snow, but it didn’t last long. I had a long quiet day which was very nice after being so rushed the past week. Tomorrow will be a bit busier as I begin to get ready for the house concert Thursday night. So I’m off to bed.

~~Rhonda

~~Rhonda ::happy::

When I get all the ribbons and little holly leaves on the stack to the left, the invitations will be finished.

I used Print Shop to design the invitation. I imported the vintage postcard print, then added the invitation and the light green background. It’s printed on a cream colored “parchment” card stock. Each sheet of card stock printed four invitations. When I trimmed them, I left a cream colored border around the green to add a light border.

I used gold Stickles to outline the border of the postcard print, then used red Stickles to outline the green background and to color the ribbons and the holly berries. Green Stickles highlight the holly leaves. Once they dried, they were matted with red card stock and I used a Krylon 18kt gold leafing pen to put the last border on the invitation.

The holly leaves were punched from green card stock printed with “Please Come!” and outlined with the gold leafing pen.

These will go in the Christmas cards and will be mailed the day before Thanksgiving. Once I get the invitations done, all I have to do for the Christmas cards is put together the Christmas letter. I’ll probably finalize that in October. But the cards/invites will be ready and waiting!

~~Rhonda

One of our blog readers asked for pictures of our past invitations. I began sending official invites in 2000. Prior to that, we just asked people to come as we saw them, included a hand-written note in our Christmas cards, and put an announcement in the Sunday bulletin for our church family.

2001 ~ This invitation has an embossed ornament with the pine and bow stamped over. The invitation was printed on speckled paper and matted on red card stock. Pretty simple!

2002 ~ The grey-shaded paper is actually silver. The stamping is embossed in silver. The invite is printed on paper, then matted on dark blue paper with torn edges.

2003 ~ The invitation is printed on red paper, embossed in gold, and has a little tag affixed. I printed the “Please Come!” on red paper and then, after stamping, cut it into a small rectangle and used a corner rounder on it.

2004 ~ I especially liked this one. I used gold, red, and green glitter glue on the gold embossed lantern. The invite is printed on ivory card stock. All three pieces of card stock are embossed in gold on all edges.

2005 ~ I was in a hurry this particular year and used a postcard picture. I imported it into Print Shop, added the invite and printed the whole thing on ivory paper, cutting the picture with a bit of ivory border. I added silver glitter embossed highlights on some of the snow, then matted it on dark green. I embossed the edge of the green with silver.

2006 ~ It is printed on white cardstock and embossed with silver. I embossed snowflakes on the left edge of the dark blue, embossed the edges of both pieces of paper and tied it together. Very easy!

2007 ~ This year’s invitation was easy to make. The stamping and edges are embossed with gold. I used one large stamp with Christmas greetings on it about 3/4 of the card. I covered the edge of that stamping with a gold ribbon, then stamped the smaller holly piece in the lower part of the right side. The invitation itself was glued over the ribbon. When the assembly was done, I finished them with spray glitter which this picture doesn’t show. Pretty!

2008 ~ It took a while for me to figure out what I wanted to do for 2008. Finally I settled on this large stamped “tree.” I used green embossing powder for the stamp, then used glitter glue for the red words and the gold star. It’s double matted with red and green card stock.

I try to keep the invites small enough to slip into our Christmas cards, which I try to mail the day before Thanksgiving. That gets the invites out a week before the party, which is always the first Sunday in December. It’s never too early to start thinking about what to do for the next open house. The best years are when I have them done early!

~~Rhonda

Our usual kitchen helpers were here, plus a few young ladies from church. Wonderful helping hands.

Stacks of cookies…

Seems everyone likes to congregate in the kitchen.

The village Genny made looked great on the cookie table.

Lots of company…family and friends.

We worked hard for this one, but it was another success.

~~Rhonda

The weather was rainy, extremely windy and got colder as the day went on. The temperature was about 60* F at noon and down to 36 by 6:00 p.m. But it didn’t keep down the crowd by very many. We usually have about 200 guests and this year we had 170+. It was a tremendous amount of work, but a tremendous amount of fun, too. DH wasn’t able to take as many pictures as I had hoped he could, but others took pictures and I hope to get some copies of those. The party was supposed to start at 2:00 pm and we had company as early as 1:30, so we didn’t have time to take “before” pictures which I like to do each year.

Our friends Gary, Laurie, Bethany and my sister Genny all helped in the kitchen which was great. It’s become a tradition and we so appreciate their generous gift of time! They keep the cookie trays full, the coffee filled, and the punch flowing. I don’t have to give it a second thought. I know it’s in good hands.

The grand-baby tree was a favorite. Everyone liked it.

On the right side of this counter I have a deer. It sits on a piece of tabletop glass which is elevated on wooden blocks. We put white lights under the glass and batting on top. Makes a lovely night time display.

The grand-baby tree sits on the counter in the addition where the guest room, laundry room and downstairs bath are located. Across from the tree there are pictures of our children as babies. I wrap them each year as gifts.

The laundry room and downstairs bath, just off the hall in the addition, have a garden theme for Christmas. The little tree in the laundry room is decorated with garden ornaments, pansies, birds, butterflies, and insects. The tree sits in an old wooden sugar bucket from DH’s family farm.

The wreath on the laundry room door has pansies and small green balls on it.

On the bookcase in the guest room, we display the book A Tale of Three Trees.

The tree in the guest room is decorated with a Victorian theme.

We had a slide show of the baby pictures in the library on my computer and a slide show in the office of cookie making. Guests enjoyed those.

The piano in the office is decorated with pictures of our children. These are pictures that have been used in our Christmas cards in years past.

The young lady who cleans house for us came today and vacuumed cookie crumbs throughout the house. But she didn’t have to do much other cleaning. My kitchen crew had cleaned the entire kitchen, took the serving tables apart, put the tablecloths in the wash, etc., so Sam cleaned the baths and vacuumed the floors. Made it all fresh again. I delivered cookies to the teachers/staff at DD’s school and then did my grocery shopping while Sam cleaned. Now I am enjoying a very quiet relaxing afternoon, which is quite a change from the hectic work we’ve been doing for a few weeks.

Thursday night about 15 women from my home extension group will be here for our Christmas party. The 14th we are hosting a house concert by Nathan Clark George. He has a beautiful Christmas album and will be performing songs from that on the 14th, accompanied by two other musicians.

On the 15th, 12-15 women from a local PCA church are coming for a house tour and potluck supper. A busy but fun time of year.

Time to get supper started. I will try to post more this evening.

You can see these and other pictures on my flickr site.

Cookie Buddies – my friends Laurie, Bethany, and Gary kept the kitchen running and the cookie trays full, along with my sister Genny, who missed getting her picture taken. Because of their tremendous help, we were able to concentrate on greeting our guests.

I put up a “grand-baby tree” in the hall of the addition.

It was decorated with baby items, pictures of the twins, baby footprint ribbon, and blue/pink glass balls, and a fuzzy pink baby blanket served as a tree skirt. This tree garnered a lot of comments. It was a favorite along with the “glass” tree in our bedroom.

Just before the open house, DD1998 added the holly berries to the wreath we painted on the door to the addition. We use poster (tempera) paint. Easy and a fun decoration. DD uses her finger to make the berry dots. This door was originally the front door of the house DH’s father was born in and lived in all his life.

DD1984′s tree had paper doves on it.

DD1987′s tree was decorated with twiggy stars and felt ornaments.

I changed the little tree in the corner of the kitchen counter to display framed pictures of our family.

Saturday afternoon Gary brought over his latest creation…the windows for the door to the downstairs bath! They are beautiful!! Thank you, Gary!

Tomorrow I will post more. Now I’m headed for bed and a good night’s sleep! ~~Rhonda