It's NOT too early..

In my opinion, when you have a house full of kids, you're lucky if you can keep your house somewhat tidy, much less get it decorated for holidays!  Because of that, I feel like it's NOT too early for me to start decorating for Christmas! (how bout that for some reasoning?  Does it sound convincing?) It's no secret that Christmas is my favorite time of year.  Not just Christmas day, but the whole season.  A lot of people don't feel like it's ok to decorate for Christmas until Thanksgiving is over, because they want to give Thanksgiving it's own glory first.  Personally, I'm not really a huge fan of the Thanksgiving holiday.  Don't get me wrong, I AM a huge fan of giving thanks for all we're blessed with, just not on ONE specific day of the year.  I am ALWAYS reminded of all I have to be thankful for, and I'm trying to teach our kids to give thanks EVERYDAY, instead of just thinking about it when you're sitting at a huge table full of food.  We are thankful for our family everyday, not just when we can all be together to share a meal.  We are thankful for the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we get to eat for lunch, not just a huge buffet of food that took hours to make.  I do enjoy the time spent with family and the food, but we eat dinner with our family just about once a week so I don't really feel the excitement that people who live hours from their family probably feel on Thanksgiving.  We also have our friends over for something I have dubbed, "Friendsgiving" and I like to have the house all decked out with Christmas stuff for that.  It's just so cozy!  Plus, when you are a Christmas NUT like me, and it takes a good 2 weeks to get everything decorated, you want to be able to enjoy it for more than a couple weeks, ya know!?  There is nothing like the excitement in a 2 year old's eyes when she sees you bringing the strands of lights and ornaments down from the attic!  Honestly I'm not sure who is more excited...me or my daughter!  We ate at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants last week and they had a mariachi band going table to table taking requests.  They played a variety of songs, but I don't think anyone was prepared for when they came to our table and Audrey politely asked them to play "Jingle Bells!"  Haha! She thoroughly enjoyed her special serenade of "Feliz Navidad!"

Since I'll be sharing pictures of our house once the decorating is finished, I thought it would only be fair to share what it looks like at the beginning of the decorating process!  As a fellow blog lover, I know sometimes you're looking at pictures of someone's house thinking "is it always that clean?"  or "does she really have it that together?"  The answer is, of course, NO!!  So here is our study right now...without me tidying or kicking anything out of the frame! :)  Don't judge.

Yep, I can't even open the other door...

So am I alone in my decorating?  Anyone else have a room that looks like this?  Please, someone tell me I'm not alone....because I'm sure my husband is going to have a conniption when he sees that I posted these pictures! :)  It's not a secret anymore....