Original blog post on PattyJ.com Be sure to check it out!
I know it’s terribly cliche, and repeated every thirty seconds, but 2020 really has been a tough year for everybody. In these unprecedented times (ugh) it only feels natural to jump at any shred of festivity you can and I think that was definitely a factor in all the early Christmas decorating. The Thanksgiving turkey hadn’t even landed on the table before people started putting up Christmas decorations. I am only slightly ashamed to say we did the same, but this year looked different than years prior.
We had been seriously talking with each other for a while about living smaller and the different ways we could do it. Then in June of 2020 we decided to throw caution to the wind and jump in head first — buying a 48 passenger school bus with the intention of converting it into our very own tiny home. Covid turned our lives upside down and we took the opportunity to throw it right back at 2020 and start a new adventure. We renovated the bus during the summer, moved on the “Green Bean the Bus” in August, and left for our adventure in September. We’ve only made it a couple thousand miles, but we’ve already seen some truly amazing places and met great people.
We’re all missing our family, so we wanted to make Christmas special. With limited space, however, we had to get creative: We got the smallest Christmas tree we could possibly find and decked it out with a whopping 2 ornaments and mini spring lights. The kids made mini gingerbread houses that got destroyed almost immediately, good thing because we really didn’t have the room. The kids gave the refrigerator a Santa makeover in dry erase marker. We made cookies, baking them in the toaster oven, zoomed with Santa, and even made paper snowflakes (hopefully we won’t be seeing any real ones). We also made homemade gifts for all of our family and friends (and another huge mess for us).
And now that Christmas Eve is upon us, we are watching Christmas movies in the bus while we wait for the rain to subside so we can go hiking all over the Providence Canyons in Western Georgia.
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