First, to everyone coming over from Holidailies, hello. You can get a brief overview of who I am here. And now, on to the day’s entry.

Shortly before we moved into the house in Sacramento, we bought tickets for a garden tour of several of the nicer homes in the Fab Forties neighborhood that’s just across the freeway from where we live. It was kind of fun to walk around, checking out the various things people did to their backyards, especially since it gave us some neat design ideas for our own back yard, some day.

So when we saw the signs for the Holiday Home Tour, in the same neighborhood, we thought it’d be just as fun – a pleasant stroll through several gorgeous homes, some of which might even provide some decorating ideas for our own little house.

Alas, it wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as the garden tour. For one thing, most of the houses we toured were pretty tiny, and the decorators who’d been chosen to decorate those houses for the holidays tended to go a bit too overboard on the floral thing – which resulted in small spaces full of sometimes cloying flower smells, and everything a bit too modern and a bit too perfect and sterile to be festive or interesting at all. Only the last house on the tour seemed worth the ticket price – it was large enough to not feel cramped as the line shuffled slowly through, and the decor was a bit more understated and looked more like a house someone might actually live in, rather than a design room showcase.

So the verdict is that while we will probably try to catch the garden tour again, I think it’s pretty unlikely we’ll be doing the home tour again. Ah well.

Happy Holidailies!