Hello Cozy Christmas Living Room

Finally got the house looking more like Christmas. The rosy glow of fall has all but vanished this past week with our temperatures dropping to very chilly levels, by our standards anyway. It has been about 23 degrees  at night and daytime only in the forties(for the celsius people -5 at night and 5 in the daytime!  I know....for those of you who live in real snow weather, this is nothing. We out here in California are true wimps when it comes to extreme temperatures. Our cold snap still lingers and the heater is running in earnest as I type this. Thought I'd share my decor with you. If you are a long time follower, it will look pretty familiar. I think next year I may change a few things to freshen it up a bit. Every year I buy two new ornaments and I photographed them above. They are the little sparkly rabbit and the squirrel.
Boy did we have a tough time getting that tree decorated last night though. The lights are always the worse part for me, but I love lots of them so I try and cram in as many as I can. All was going well, until I plugged it in at the end and 3/4 of them were burned out! We took what we thought were the bad strands off and checked all the other strings I had waiting in the wings. They were all bad unfortunately, so I yanked them all off and headed over to Target to get more. We bought two strands of 200 lights. So there are 400 lights on this little petite tree!  This year we bought a different variety of Christmas tree, that I had never seen before. It is called a Nordmann variety.  It is quite dark green and lush. Apparently they are new to America and used in Germany and Norway for Christmas trees. I'm in love with them. If you go to the link (click on the name) you will see a few facts about them. The needles are beautiful and dark green , and on the underside they are a silvery white.
My little helper Caitlin came on Sunday to assist.  We kind of take over, so Dave and Cyrous stepped aside and let us work our magic. I love the picture of Cyrous, because not even tree trimming will take him away from his math studies!
My little maple tree has now shed all of its leaves and is ready to take a long winters nap until spring time, and I'm off right now to do some more sewing. Hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season so far.