I thought I would share some photos of our holiday decorations this year. Starting off is my collection of Christmas snow globes. Our first holiday tradition as a couple was to purchase a snow globe. Now, every year we add a new snow globe to the collection. This year we added the gingerbread house below.
Our entry way is a bit of a catch all, where keys, sunglasses and mail seem to gather. I tried to set up a mini mail center with a basket and letter sized shredder. A shredder isn’t exactly a fashion statement, but it keeps the migrating mail clutter down by shredding junk mail immediately and keeping the rest in a basket. I use photo frames or other decor to block the shredder from view. Here you can see the felt Christmas trees I made this year. The tins on the wall are an advent calendar on a magnetic board, each tin has a surprise inside.
While we don’t have a real fireplace, this one is almost as fun to decorate. There is some sort of magic about decorating a mantle on Christmas. I knitted the five small stockings a few years back, they serve as both a garland and our cat’s stockings.
This santa is the first decoration I bought in my very first apartment on my own, so it has a lot of meaning for me. The mixed media canvas next to it is something I made last year. The ceramic santa and tree are a cherished family heirloom my grandmother had for decades and passed on to me last year.
Our tree this year came from a little tree farm nearby, it is a Douglas fir, which is a little harder to decorate than the standard Fraser fir because of its softer needles, but I love the look and smell of the tree. Nothing smells better than a live Christmas tree in the house!
This year, I placed the tree in a bushel basket to give it a homie look. The secret is to cut the bottom out of the basket and place the stand inside. We used a DIY stand this year, with a 5-gallon bucket filled with stones. It secures the tree and gives you more room for water so you have to add it less often. I placed plastic wrap over top of the bucket to minimized evaporation and to keep the blanket dry. It always works very well to keep animals from drinking out of the stand!
Another trick I used this year to make decorating easier was to hang the lights on the tree vertically instead of wrapping them around the tree. It makes them much easier to adjust and remove and you can use the very top of the tree to hold most of the weight of the lights to keep the branches from sagging. The lights also seem to get lost less and seem like there are more this way, though I don’t know why!
I added a little more flare to the wreath I wrote about in the last post, but adding battery powered LEDs. The battery pack hide neatly behind the ribbon.
