Five Favorite Decemberings - Part 3 - The Decorator

Hi folks! I'm back to finish sharing my five favorite things about December ("Decemberings"), a little belated, but it is only January 7th, right? We had quite a bit of commotion over Christmas break, but it was all good commotion.

Part 3 - The Decorator

One of my favorite things about December was seeing what Peyton would decorate next. Over the course of the the second half of this year, she has shown an interest in decorating. She will decorate her dresser (picture from September above), her nightstand, lamps, her toy kitchen, anything with hooks or surfaces really. Even the floor. She just makes designs out of things, like these "jewelry people" from this summer's design portfolio...

Truth be told, she and I have even had a few spats over how long a certain display should stay displayed on her nightstand or bookcase. The "rainbow" display--which consisted of pictures in books, unicorns, and anything else in the house that resembled a rainbow arranged just so--really outstayed its welcome on her nightstand this Fall. The propped up books were wilting.(Wish I had a picture!)

Anyway, as you might imagine, preparing for Christmas really drew out the Candace Olsen in her. She was most excited about doing gingerbread houses...

...and probably getting to decorate hers and Harper's own tree. We had two this year--theirs and ours. This was mine and Blake's oh-so-sly trick to not have to share our tree with them. It didn't really work though. I kept finding strands of costume jewelry on the branches of our "grown-up" tree, or found Peyton moving ornaments back and forth between the two trees. She waved off all our reminders to stick to decorating her own tree.

And she doesn't just exercise this gift at home. She feels completely comfortable decorating other people's houses too. Here she chose to brighten up the banister at Uncle Tom and Aunt Jan's house on Christmas Eve by using recycling gift wrapping ribbon left on the floor after the all the great-grandchildren thrashed through their gifts. She already knows the decorating basics - use whatever you have on-hand in a new way. :-)

Well friends and family, this would be the point in the story where I get to the point. I have a favorite decoration Peyton created this year, that I don't want to forget. It's just so random, and it's one of those things that make you wonder how the mind of a child tries to sort out all the stuff they hear. She took colored craft pom-poms (which she uses daily to decorate any number of things) and did this to my very special made-of-olive-bark-by-a-Palestinian-Christian nativity scene....

...no biggie, maybe a little cute, right? But then she said this: "When you believe in God, it changes the colors of the floor."

Now, I'm not sure what the original ingredients were that jumbled together to create that line, but I still think about it and wonder. Maybe I'll ask her again what that means. Anyway, I knew this wasn't a decoration to argue over. I left it like that until she needed the pom poms for something else, which I knew would only be a matter of a couple days.

So the making of our very own miniature interior decorator is one of my favorite things about December. Next year, I will have to remember that Peyton and Christmas decorating are like toddlers and glass ornaments--you can't keep them apart.