Last Monday (November 25th) we turned our apartment into our own personal winter wonderland! I know it was technically before Thanksgiving, and usually I always wait until after my favorite Thursday of the year before even listening to Christmas music, but this year I was aching to get into the holiday spirit! And besides, we had our Thanksgiving the Sunday before the actual day, so I wasn’t really breaking my own rules ;) Plus, we’re leaving for the States on December 17th, so we wanted at least 3 weeks to enjoy our Christmas decorations.

I am so happy we decided to decorate our living room with reds, whites, blacks, and dark browns, because it totally made it possible for us to put up a red-white-and-silver woodsy theme for our tree! The color red never used to be pleasing to me, but when I was a Junior in college, our apartment was furnished with this amazing red corduroy couch that I fell absolutely in love with. Ever since then, it was my dream to have one of my own, and when we moved to our new apartment, Matt found me one that even came with a matching ottoman! Major husband points :)

So last Monday evening, we went out and bought our first real tree together (last year we only had room for small, fake ones), and it’s so cute and adorable! French Christmas trees are pretty different from the giant and full ones I’m used to back in the States, but the one we found is perfect!

It’s always so hard to make a Christmas tree look as beautiful on camera as it looks in real life, but at least you can see most of our Disney ornaments from this picture ;)

After setting up our tree, nativity scene (‘crèche’ en français), and various Christmas decorations, we ate our Thanksgiving leftovers (which is half the fun of Thanksgiving!), and then curled up to watch It’s a Wonderful Life (my favorite Christmas movie of all time!) and munch on some tasty Chocolate Peppermint Cookies I whipped up. These cookies were so delicious I’m sharing the recipe I found with you (including my alterations):

Mmm :)

I found the recipe here, but I made the following alterations:
• I did not use chocolate chips; instead I used 1 cup of Andes Peppermint Crunch baking chips (the peppermint taste was strong)
• Judging from the picture, you can also see that I did not make the glaze the recipe calls for.

The cookies were a blend of crunchy and chewy, and with the Andes chips I used, the peppermint flavor was strong, so if you make this recipe yourself be careful not to add too much unless you want your cookies tasting like toothpaste ;)

Hope you all are having a wonderful December so far :) Since we’ve put up our Christmas decorations, we have only had one calamity happen–Solo got so excited when we came home Tuesday night that he ran into our tree and knocked it completely over, which caused several ornaments to break :( But don’t worry, after a bit of a time-out, he was forgiven…

Our tree has since been restored to its jolly Christmasey self :)