fun stuff » and another thought

I love Christmas; I think it’s my favourite time of year. I love listening the the music and watching the movies and eating the goodies, oh and decorating. I love filing the house with lights and evergreen and Santa. This year I received a little inspiration after clicking through our 3M Deck the Halls holiday decor gallery.

Jen F’s crafty snowflake DIY project was great but her Santa wall won my heart, mainly because we have our own Santa wall. Each year we get photos of our kids sitting with Santa. Instead of just displaying the current year, we have a corner of our room that’s devoted to these photos. We even bought a holiday Tim Biskip print to go in the center and are in the process of adding Santa photos from both my husband’s and my own childhood. I love looking at these photos even when Christmas has passed. I also love the mix of frames, sizes and placements. I’m not into symmetries with this wall.

We have a wood burning fireplace with a mantle we actually moved from our old home. Seeing Stephanie’s holiday mantle inspired me to deck out ours. Our mantel extends up the wall so we don’t have wall space to hang holiday inspired art but I love the idea of draping it with garland. Since our mantle is old wood I’d never hammer nails into it so the 3M hooks came in handy, adding them to the top to secure the garland. And knowing they’ll come off when the holiday’s are over, without marring the wood is reassuring.

We have two french doors that go from our front hall into our living room. In the past I’ve just decorated them with snowflakes but after viewing Melissa’s idea, with wreaths hanging on her dining room window, I thought I’d try something similar. Instead of buying wreaths to hang, instead I made some from extra garland (I had a whole bunch of the cheap garland unopened from the previous year). Taking the garland, I just wrapped it around in a circle, just like wrapping up a garden hose. Every once in a while, I’d twist to branches together, to hold the whole wreath together. It didn’t turn out to bad for a quick 5-minute project. And the 3M decorative hooks worked well, adhering right to the window.

I also added a nicer (thicker) garland and lights to the banister in the hallway. Instead of wrapping it around the banister itself, which uses up a lot of the garland, plus makes it hard to use the banister, I used small, clear 3M hooks to hold the loops in place. When we moved from traditional lights to these LED lights, I was left with a lot of light covers. These make great items to adorn garland. Plus they add a little more to the garland during the day, when the lights aren’t actually on.

I was also inspired by this great vintage paper chain DIY tree garland. It reminded me of how fun garlands can be (and it gave me an excuse to use those crafty cutting edge scissors that never seem to get used). One night the kids and I spent a few hours cutting and making a colourful paper chain to string across the dining room. I looks great and the kids love to see it hanging over their heads during meals.

A member’s blog post also brought on a childhood crafting memory. You know, those wreaths we made in school using garbage bags? Yup, so my kids and I made one of those too and hung it on our front door.

So I may not be done my Christmas shopping and the cards are still sitting unaddressed in a pile, but our home looks festive. That’s good right?