“What do dinosaurs have to do with Christmas?” asked my pragmatic and grumpy eldest son.

But, really, perhaps the better question is, “what do villages have to do with Christmas?!” Why did people decide that it makes sense to set up tiny little houses in December and not any other time of year? At least my dinosaurs embrace having nothing to do with Christmas.

But here they are anyway for the third year in a row. Two years ago they were our advent calendar. Last year they were turned into ornaments. And this year they’re invading our Christmas village. Because ANYTHING can be Christmassy if you add enough glitter to it.

I bought the Christmas village at the thrift store last year because, even though it doesn’t make a lot of sense, I’m a sucker for a Christmas village. All the buildings were in their original boxes and so tiny and adorable I could not resist them. A little research revealed that what I have is the Liberty Falls Village: the buildings were sold in department stores between 1991 and 2003; they were meant to get people into the  store (ten were released every year on different days in the weeks leading up to Christmas, so you’d have to go to the store ten times to get all of them) rather than as money makers in and of themselves. Today you can buy the buildings on ebay for next to nothing, so mine at $1 each were only an okay deal, and this isn’t the fanciest Christmas village out there or anything. So it needed something extra. It needed dinosaurs.

I know there is, to put it mildly, some controversy involved in Christmas decorating before Thanksgiving. And I usually do mostly hold out, not so much because of philosophical objections, but because we usually have out of town guests for Thanksgiving and getting ready for that occupies most of my time and energy. But this year my in-laws will be coming for Christmas instead, so I kind of feel like I get a whole extra month to get ready for Christmas. And I really like the more relaxed pace. It will be quite awhile before all of our Christmas stuff is out, but I plan to do a little bit at a time over the next few weeks in hopes that it won’t get overwhelming.

Anyway, we turned on the Christmas music, and I let the kids unpack all the little buildings and set them up on the buffet in the dining room. And then we set up a cone tree forest on the edges of the village. Then came the dinosaurs. I set the dinosaurs up myself, of course, because dinosaur placement is a much bigger responsibility than building placement. Roar!

I felt bad about skipping over Thanksgiving entirely, though, so I did a little fall/Thanksgiving display on the dresser in the foyer when I took the Halloween stuff down:

Honestly, I mostly wanted to do it so I’d have a good excuse to break out my tiny little turkey:

But I also made a super simple little string of leaves from black cardstock. I used this template from Oil and Blue.

It also gave me a reason to leave my beloved brass pumpkin out a little longer, and to get immediate use out of those white and gold pumpkins that were post Halloween clearance finds at Target.

So it’s begun!

One blogging advantage of early but slow Christmas decorating, though, is that there’s time for non-Christmas posts in between the Christmas ones. I have not one, not two, but THREE posts in the works right now that have nothing whatsoever to do Christmas (or even Thanksgiving).