Sunshine!

Most of the week before Christmas, it poured rain here. Poured, and poured, and poured. For days. I have a hard time seeing pouring rain as festive, even though the cloudy and wet skies made an easy excuse to say indoors and partake of more holiday treats.

Delo's amazing Snowflake Cake

Eventually, we had to face reality that our front walk and parking area had become a landscape of mini-lakes. When the sun FINALLY came out two days ago (along with unusual sub-zero temperatures here that I won't complain about), we were ready for action. In the space of a few hours, a load of gravel, a load of bark mulch and two energetic rakers yielded some happy results.

Christmas Greetings

Christmas 2010 from S Unger on Vimeo.

A larger version of this video can be seen here

Deck the halls

Jeff and I are looking forward to a relatively quiet Christmas with Stanway relatives here on Vancouver Island. While it would have been great to spend Christmas with our siblings or my parents, we are a little relieved not to be travelling very far.

Since the beginning of December was spent locked in my office labouring over a term paper, decorations this year are fairly low key but that's just fine with us. This Christmas Open House/Tour is for my mom and sister-in-law, two of the most enthusiastic Christmas decorators I know. Welcome to our holiday home!

Living and Dining Room

Entrance and Kitchen

Family Room

My first job was making Christmas ornaments out of nuts (a filbert for the head and a walnut for the body) and the lady I worked for gave a set to my Mom. These ornaments were on a small tree in my parent's dining room until two years ago, when they were passed to me.

Bathroom

Master Bedroom

Early Christmas

My brother and sister-in-law Jennifer came out to the West Coast for a sort of job interview and during their visit, carved out the better part of a day to meet up with us in West Vancouver. We had not seen each other in almost two years and had a wonderful day celebrating an early Christmas, window shopping, catching up and laughing much together. Jen and I share a love of shoes, home decor and things that sparkle and had great fun dreaming (and squeaking) over many things that caught our eye(s). I was feeling pretty burned out from this semester at school and our day together energized me for the holidays. Despite the rain, we had such a great time together.

Getting rid of the red

Life on the West Coast is pretty warm. Jeff and I heat our home with two gas fireplaces and very seldom turn on the furnace. The living room fireplace is Jeff's go-to spot when he comes home from work and we have many a conversation while toasting our buns in front of it.

While the living room fireplace is very functional, it has never been my favourite thing to look at. I don't usually like things that are red- funny, I know, because of my hair colour. Last year, I painted the tile surround charcoal grey, hoping that would help things. It did... but not enough. Since replacing a perfectly good fireplace seems unecessary, we opted for a makeover. Two cans of stove paint, some newspaper and tape, a cardboard box, a patient painter, and an even more patient cleaner (to dust up all of the black spray dust that covered nearly every surface when we were finished) were needed for this transformation.

Jeff took care of the whole project several weeks ago while I worked on another school assignment. I think he did a fantastic job.