Oh hey there. Thought I was gone forever? Turns out, I was just sucked into the vacuum that is home ownership. That’s right, Steve and I finally bought a house! Mainly for Schooner, but we live there too. I swear there is going to be lots more to come on this topic, but for now I at least wanted to share our 2018 Christmas card!

If you’ve been round these parts before, you know that holiday cards are a very big deal to me starting waaaaaaay back and have since continued taken over in my adult life/relationship with Steve (see last year’s here). This is in fact our 8th card together, and probably one of the most momentous ones to date. Listen, we just (and by just, I mean six months ago) bought a house – ain’t no extra disposable income lying around for both a moving announcement AND a Christmas card. So we decided to combine them and kill two birds with one stone by featuring our new digs as the main attraction of this year’s card (although Schooner in a tiny scarf is very difficult to compete with), thanks to Denny who for the second time has come through when needed for an impromptu photo shoot.

I had these grand plans of getting the card done super early so all our friends and family would have our new location and therefore avoid getting approximately 97 texts asking “hey! What’s your new address?!” but alas, twas not meant to be. You see, even though we took some perfectly lovely pics of the house on our closing day, that wasn’t enough for crazy ol’ me, oh no. We needed to do it again, this time with feeling! And by feeling I mean flannels and wreaths. So needless to say, this had to wait until Steve was done decorating the exterior of the house, which was only simultaneously happening at the same time as 20823920188392082 other projects.

I was also really excited to use my new return address stamp that my dear friend Katie sent us as a housewarming gift! It’s from Paper Source, and it’s super convenient because you just go online with a code that comes inside the package, pick the style you want (we obviously chose a Griswold-inspired design specifically for Christmas cards), and it arrived within a manner of days. I want to do a whole post about non-cheesy housewarming gifts, because I thought this was a genius idea and I was not at all paid to say that (but let’s talk, Paper Source, wink wink).

Every year I make a point to buy my Christmas stamps early, because you just never know if your local post office is going to run out of the fun ones. Nothing against baby Jesus, but the Madonna & Child variety just doesn’t fit the overall feel of our card (and they had two different versions). I was nerdily excited to get the Birds in Winter options this year. I just thought they were so cute (although my all time favorite winter stamp will always be the pinecone version the year we got married that I stalked various mail carriers for to use on our invitations).

So like I said, much much MUCH more to come on the homefront (get it?!) but for now, may your days be merry and bright and may your heating bills be low. Houses are fun! Merrily yours, ~L