I know I’m a bit behind the times with this post since the Christmas season is long over.  I have a good excuse though, I’ve been struggling with some dental problems.  I ended up having to get a tooth pulled (ugh!), and then … as per usual for me … it is taking a while for me to feel better.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t really handle tooth pain very well.  I tend to curl up in a ball under the covers and hope that it goes away.  And that pretty much zaps my creative energy.

But, it has slowly started improving this week.  That, combined with our unseasonably warm weather, motivated me to get outside and transition my Christmas decor into simply ‘winter’ decor.

You may remember that last year we had so much snow that I couldn’t even get to some of my Christmas decorations to take them down!

But this year is a completely different story.  Our brown Christmas has turned into a mostly brown January too.

I took down my red and green Christmas lights, and put away the evergreen garland and faux red berries.

But I left the white lights in the pots on either side of the deck stairs.

In my opinion, white lights in the garden look pretty any time of year.  Plus, we need all the extra light we can get on these still long winter nights.  One thing about a warmer than usual winter, the nights are much darker without any snow to reflect the moonlight.

I’ll also leave the evergreens and dried flower heads in the pots for at least another month or so.

We haven’t had any heavy snow this winter, so the hydrangeas are holding up really nicely and providing some great winter interest in the garden.

I’m trying to appreciate brown this year.

And if you look closely at that photo above there are even some pops of green!  In January!  How crazy is that?  The green is mostly lamium, or spotted dead nettles, which stays green year round, even when it’s buried under a foot or two of snow.

And hey, remember my little experiment with leaving some ornamental kale in the front flower box to see how it holds up over winter?

It still looks fairly decent, doesn’t it?  Although I suspect that it will turn to complete mush when it really warms up outside.

You may have noticed that I took down the Rudolph and Co. sign that hung next to the door and replaced it with my Skate Rental sign.

I painted this one up two years ago using a stencil from Wallcutz.

I have to confess though, I’m still looking forward to replacing that sign with the Flower Market sign.  Last year I did that just in time for our April Fools snowstorm, remember?

Although I’d pretty much had it with snow by April 1 of last year, it was really pretty!

In other news, my sister and I are headed off to Disney World today.  Since I’ve been laying low to recover from the tooth extraction, I don’t have any posts stored up to share while I’m gone so the blog will be on hiatus for next week.  But I’ll be back in another week, hopefully more fully recovered and ready to go!