DH & I are feeling the spirit a bit more this year than usual. My dear father died in a car accident in December 2002, just a few days after his 50th birthday and just a few days before Christmas, and it's taken me this long for the month of December to be anything other than utterly depressing. DH was very close to Dad too, so it has been hard on both of us.
BUT...this year feels a little different, to both of us. For the last several years we procrastinated on decorating and buying a tree until we're buying the saddest lopsided Charlie Brown tree on the lot the night before Christmas and just putting out a couple things. This year I want us to buy a tree much earlier, maybe even first week in December, and actually bother to decorate the house. It's been years since we put out our "village" of cast-plaster houses - we still have a few unpainted, maybe we'll get around to those this year too. Another thing we used to do and just sort of stopped. We don't have kids so it was easy to let all our traditions drop away, but now I'm starting to miss them.
I've started "decorating" the outside of my house a little bit already, but I come from a granola-crunching hippy family so my "traditional outdoor Christmas decorations" are really just bird food bells and the like, to help all my feathered neighbors get through the cold months. But I hang them with green and red ribbons and wrap green and red ribbons around the tall feeders, so I count it as "decorating", LOL. We don't usually do lights, maybe a string around the front door but that's about it.
As for gifts...my most favorite gift, that I look forward to the most every year, is the hand drawn Christmas cards my niece and nephew make. My niece makes one for me, my nephew makes one for DH, and I love them to pieces. I'm probably a little bit biased but I think those kids are the cleverest and sweetest kids on the planet, and their cards are always funny and cute and...I just love them! (The kids AND the cards!)