The living room is where we keep a cheery, cozy fire burning in the fireplace throughout the long, dark winter months.   We snuggle up on the large leather sofa with warm fleecy blankets for the pups and watch old movies.   A few of our favorite movies are:  Christmas in Connecticut, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, A Christmas Carol, The Man Who Invented Christmas, The Homecoming, The Man Who Came to Dinner,  and many other old classics.

This year we did NOT struggle with strings of electrical lights on the tree.   Instead, we bought clip-on remote controlled LED candles and they are FANTASTIC!  No fuss, no muss and they give the Christmas tree an old-fashioned Victorian look to it.

It takes about a week to get Henwoodie completely ready for the holidays.  We put the last finishing touches on the decorations last night, got all the candles in the windows, and settled down with the pups and nice cheery fire in the fireplace and watched The Holly and the Ivy (1952 black and white Christmas movie).   Now that the house is decorated I can concentrate on drawing and painting in the studio.

The dining room is always finished first.   The Christmas china and silver will be brought out for the meals eaten in this room.

The best kind of weather when you are buying the Christmas tree is a SNOWY DAY!   We got about 10″ of snow the day we bought our Christmas tree.   It added more magic to the day and was just perfect!

We have snow for the holidays this year!   We bought the Christmas tree while it was snowing—made it all that more magical.

I found a wonderful couple of artists in Michigan on Etsy that custom-made six coffins for the collection.   Thank you Dan and Neysa!  Three 13″ coffins and three 9″ coffins.  The coffins are called “toe pinchers”.  The craftsmanship is amazing on these coffins and I had a great time staining them.   Ruby red shimmering velvet is used to line the coffins once the vampyres are placed in them.

The vampyre brood has been moved out of the studio and is crammed onto the library table in the living room for the month of October.   Later we will do some serious photoshoots of the collection with select pieces taken out to showcase their beauty.