We've been getting rather festive in our B&B over the past week. In the run up to Christmas we have three Dickensian festivals in the village, the whole place transforms and has a magical feel in the air. Last weekend I dressed as a giant gingerbread man and stood outside the local school trying to entice people in for tea, coffee and mince pies. I'm not entirely sure what the link between the gingerbread man was and I felt that we should be offering gingerbread men inside! I enjoyed it though, possibly a bit more than I should have. No-one else volunteered though and that has kind of backfired on me, because I will now be there again next week!
I have been really enjoying decorating the B&B, making sure that it is emulating the magical feel which is so apparent everywhere else in the village. We've got all sorts of decorations and it has been so much fun putting them all up. I dug out our bare twig tree which has lights built in and is about 5ft tall. We bought it last year because we weren't having Christmas at home and it seemed fairly pointless buying a real tree. My son and I decorated the tree this year, which is up outside the guests' bedrooms. It looks really good and we've gone with a white and red theme. I think it's important to have specific colours when you're decorating a large house, otherwise it runs the risk of looking like Christmas threw up on the place!
I have been contemplating buying a pre-decorated Christmas tree just to make life a little bit easier. I've seen some in Tesco which look really nice. We will always have a tree for the guests and it would be nice if it was already decorated and ready to go. It would save time when we put it up as well. We will get a real tree for our family too and obviously the children will help to decorate that one. We won't get it until closer to Christmas though. We're also not decorating our part of the house yet because we usually decorate around twelve days before Christmas. It has certainly been rather odd getting the place looking festive so early. The tree has been up since the end of November! How about you? When do you usually put your decorations up? Are they up already?
Disclosure: This post is written for Tesco.