Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Christmas Joy

The year I started this blog I did posts on how much I love holidays and decorating and posted copiously about Halloween and even did a Thanksgiving post. But somehow I missed posting about all my Christmas decorations, and that’s where it all started. 😍

So here is a tour of my house all decorated for Christmas. 

First, the trees. For years I had a real tree in the “formal” living room and a small “Kid’s Tree” upstairs in the loft that had all their decorations from school. But a couple years ago I went fake. It was the best decision ever. I love not having to go search for a tree or having to clean up pine needles afterwards. And once I got one fake tree and saw how easy and fabulous that was, the next thing I knew I had 3: one for each living area, including the upstairs library/loft. 

The "main" tree in the formal living room

The tree in the living room

The loft/library tree

I can even see two trees from the kitchen. #love

Our outside decorations seem to change every year - except for the string across the top of the house that my neighbor puts up for me every year. 

The front yard

Me and Zoe in the front yard

My Villages have grown to 2 over the years.  I love making new scenes every year.  I would make villages in every room if this stuff wasn't so expensive. I could do another blog post about all the cute village houses and figures.  

The Foyer Village

The Loft Village

I even decorate the bathrooms. Honestly, these are the most fun rooms in the house to do. They’re so small that you can make a big decorative splash pretty easily. A holiday shower curtain is too fun.  I love these even more than my Halloween ones.  




Here are a few other pictures, or maybe more than a few.  This brings me joy.  

The china cabinet

The cedar chest

The dining room


The Kitchen

My bedroom


The loft

The fireplace

Santa's Coat Rack

More pictures

More knick-knacks

This is a picture of the room I keep all the decorations in when they are not up.  It is the 6th (and largest) bedroom in the house.

Halloween and Thanksgiving on the right, Christmas on the left.  There are also boxes in here for Easter, July 4th, St Patrick's Day, Fiesta, Summer and probably others I am forgetting. 


MERRY CHRISTMAS I cant wait for all the 70% off sales after the holidays so I can buy more.  #joy



Thursday, December 17, 2020

Tiktok Therapy: A very Joyful Rant


For so long I resisted Tiktok. I suspected it would turn out be as unnecessary as Snapchat is, the most overrated text messaging app of all time. When my daughter would look at it on it on her phone it seemed filled with inane videos of nothing. I made fun of it. Oops.  

Because boy, was I so totally wrong. Completely. Tiktok is my favorite entertainment app ever. And now that I’m a convert, daughter Zoë has graciously avoided saying “I told you so” even once. She’s the epitome of the caring, tolerant Gen Z generation all the way. 

 

I can’t remember why I finally downloaded the app. I wish I could. I heard someone recently say they downloaded it around the time Trump was threatening to ban it just so they could have it (in case). That may have contributed, but I feel like I’d already been scrolling through videos at that point. But it really doesn’t matter because I became hooked pretty much instantly. Ultimately, I think there is one major primary reason I decided to get it: because social media (in fact pretty much all media) had become unbearable for me leading into the election. I was looking for a happy, mindless escape, and I found it! 


I felt like I did when FB first came out and I connected with all my old friends and family who lived far away. It was fabulous back then (not filled with negativity and conspiracies and judgement and superiority like now). During the election when I would sit down at the end of the day and tune into Facebook or Twitter to see what my friends were up to all I could really see were politics. Trump-this and Trump-that, pandemic-horror-story-here and pandemic-horror-story-there (and how it was some leader's fault, usually Trump). This was NOT what I needed after a day at work.  I don't watch much TV and while I read a lot of books in my free time, I needed something less hard.  ;)  

 

The first videos I saw on Tiktok were what Zoë later told me are “Dance Tiktok.” I was mesmerized. I found it highly entertaining. The more I “liked” these videos, the more poured into my feed. Young people energetically dancing - and teaching others how to dance (so much moon walking!) restored my faith in Gen Z, a group I was worried didn’t know how to dance at all. Again - I could not have been more wrong. 

 

Most of the dancers were men. Good looking men. I think this is what led to to more and more attractive men in my “for you “ feed. Is there a Really-nice-looking-guy Tiktok? I think I’m in it. This probably also led me to “Dating over 50” Tiktok which is laugh-out-loud hilarious. Men and women sharing dating horror stories with humor and intelligence. I just love it. 

 

Next came Cat Tiktok. There is nothing more soothing (to me) than watching a cute baby kitten that had been abandoned, rescued by the video creator drinking from a bottle for the first time for 60 long, satisfying seconds. Oh em gee, squeal, like, share, coo, scroll to the next video. Repeat.  Ingenious Cat Tiktok is also pretty enjoyable.  

 

It didn’t stop with just cats though. Anything furry and cute is good fun too. The videos where someone teaches a small animal like a squirrel to do things on command. What?! More more more please! 

 

I also love these Tiktoks: 

I even found a secret Santa gift on Tiktok of a prank meowing cat that was so fun to see play out at my work place. I also love the videos where the creator highlights something totally random that I totally agree with like this one.  

 

So my Tiktok review is this: The creativity! The humor! The intelligence! The clever and entertaining shit people come up with is just amazing. I can mindlessly scroll through Tiktok without a care in the world for hours laughing (days if I let myself), just fucking delighted. 

 

Thank you, Tiktok creators. You have restored my faith in social media.