The TaterTwin abode, pre-holiday decor

As you all know, we moved into this house this summer- and before we left our old house, we rented a HUGE dumpster and just cleared out stuff we hadn’t touched in ages.  This prompted us to need lots of new holiday decor this Christmas season!  Last week, I bought us a new tree and some ornaments to replace our old beat up tree.   And last year, with two tiny toddlers who got into everything (although that hasn’t changed) we decided to forgo the big tree and we put up a tiny 3 foot one on an end table.

For many years, we spent the holidays with family, so our tree was pretty pathetic and our outside decorations were non-existent.  We really were starting from scratch- especially with the lights and other decor for outside the house.  Our old house was on a remote dead end, and we just never bothered to get lights for it in the years we lived there.  I always wanted to, but we just never got around to it.  But now we live on base, and EVERYONE decorates their houses for the holidays.  I should have known by the way everyone went all out for Halloween!

The other evening, while driving around base housing looking at everybody’s lights, Dylan and Ryan were oohing and aahing and clapping the whole time.  It was adorable, watching them feel the holiday magic.  I knew that we just had to get some pretty lights for the twins’ sakes.  Needless to say, I was absolutely thrilled to be selected to participate in a shopper insights study from Collective Bias specifically to select outdoor lighting from Kmart!  My mission was to decorate the outside of our house as much as possible for $100.

This afternoon, we headed to Kmart where the six of us spent entirely too long looking at everything and playing with it all as well.  I had grand visions of wrapping those two front poles in white lights and pine garland, but I could not find any garland that wasn’t pre-lit with multi colored flashing lights.  Some sections of the holiday decorations were quite picked over- I suppose that’s what happens when you wait until 10 days before Christmas!  But, everything was on sale, so that made up for it.

I moved on to Plan B which includes the bows in the photo above.  Can you guess where this is headed?  I also bought spools of coordinating ribbon.  We still needed lights though, because what’s the point of decorating the outside of your house if it’s not lit up like the Griswalds?  We decided to go with the dangling white icicle lights to line the roof.

We really had a great time shopping together as a family and deciding what direction to go in with our decorations.  The only thing I’m sad about  is the fact that I was vetoed on the ‘Holiday Pig with Antlers’.  Don’t know what I’m talking about?  Well you can check out our entire trip to Kmart  here.  And I’ll be back in a couple days to show you photos of our finished results!

This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias. #CBias