December 8, 2014
Today is my
deadline for putting up Christmas decorations.
I’ve pulled the small tabletop artificial Christmas tree from its box and placed it on a table in our living room.
Charming and I will decorate it later today. I’ve also brought up some other decorations
from the basement. I didn’t really
realize how many Christmas decorations we own until I saw the empty storage
rack where they live in our basement eleven months out of the year. We don’t normally decorate a lot for
Christmas. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that we have two extremely inquisitive cats and a rambunctious
dog. Another reason we don’t decorate much for Christmas is that, invariably, our house is in disarray every Christmas due to some
renovation project.
Although these
projects aren’t usually huge in nature, they do seem to necessitate that our furniture ends up in
unusual places. For the past year, in
addition to our living room furniture, we’ve had a kitchen table and antique
sideboard in our living room. Our
bedroom has a small rectangular table in it that also belongs in the
kitchen. Some additional kitchen
furniture is in the basement and in Charming’s office. Although the kitchen re-do is coming to an
end, it will still make Christmas decorating a bit difficult this year. (By the way, the “big reveal” as they say on
HGTV should take place within the next few weeks. Charming is having a small medical issue that
has put the work on hold temporarily, but he's looking forward to this project coming to a close as much as I am.)
I’ve also been
working on an idea for table center pieces for our family Christmas party,
which is coming up in the next couple of weeks.
My sister, Betty, organizes this big bash for our family each year. She does a magnificent job at making the season
bright for all of us. Below are pictures
of what I’ve come up with so far. I
wanted the center pieces to be edible, but they also had to be in keeping with
the decorating theme. This year’s theme
is snowmen. A few months ago, I found
some small black felted hats at our local thrift shop. These fit in perfectly with the snowman them,
so I built the center piece around these hats.
I baked some of my Gluten-Free Cranberry Oatmeal White Chocolate Chip
cookies, which will make up the body of the centerpiece. These center pieces are easy and relatively
quick to create. Since my family loves
to eat (especially cookies), I’m hoping they’ll be a hit.
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| I found these little black hats at our local thrift shop. That got the ball rolling and my imagination going. |
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| I cut some strips of red and green felt for the hat bands then added artificial greenery from another craft project along with small pine cones that I found at our town park. |
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| This dressed the hats up quite a bit. |
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| I tried in vain to find white 4" Christmas ornaments for the snowman's face, but apparently white is not "in" for Christmas this year. So I had to improvise and came up with a white balloon for the snowman's face. |
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| Here's is the assembled snowman. The body is made up of cookies in a clear cellophane "goody" bag that I purchased at a Dollar Tree store. The hat came from the thrift store. The scarf is a strip of wool that was left over from the braided wool rug that I made for my kitchen. The head is a white balloon with a face drawn on with a permanent marker. It should look okay on the tables surrounded by a few small branches of pine. |
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