A Little Christmas Cheer

Christmas is here!! I love the Target commercial that is on now. The parents are saying goodbye after Thanksgiving dinner and thanking their daughter for a great time. When she closes the door and turns around the whole house has been decorated for Christmas and her husband is in an ugly sweater drinking eggnog. It really does feel like in the blink of an eye after you loosen your pants from too much turkey BAM! It's Christmas!

Well we LOVE Christmas around here and this is our first Christmas in our new home and we couldn't be more excited to dress it up and start some new traditions as a family! In preparation for the big tree event we started small with making some Cranberry/Kumquat garland, a few decorative pieces and I also made Pete his very own advent calendar! They were all fun to make, inexpensive and easy!

First the Garland...

We really should have used fishing wire but we couldn't find any so thread worked. We tied a match stick (with the sulfur part taken off, so it was just wood) to the bottom of the thread to catch the berries and then with a needles started to thread cranberries and kumquats. Usually I am very OCD when it comes to things like this and it has to be exact, like 27 cranberries and 1 kumquat REPEAT. This year I decided to chill out and i just strung however I damn well pleased. We made about 4 of them and other than Hurley trying to eat all of them, I think they came out great! We had to hang them off the chandelier to keep them away from Hurley until we had the tree, but now I may have to make more because I kind of liked how they looked!

Decorative pieces...

This was easy because most of the work was done at Thanksgiving! I just swapped out the orange leaves and Fallish things for pine cones and greenery. The cranberries and acorns still look great and I added a squirrel - of course! Also my forever a Girl Scout aunt, showed us all of the awesomeness we have in our own back yard! So by cutting a few branches and berries we made a really pretty piece to add some festive charm to the corner. But because it is real, you do have to keep it in water to keep it alive! we also kept it high up because we didn't want Hurley eating the berries. Damn that Dog. We also added some berries, and greenery to our lanterns and around the windows.

Advent Calendar...

This I was particularly proud of! Again, super easy. All it took was some match boxes from the dollar store, some pretty Festive paper, a glue gun and some candy! First you empty the match boxes (save the matches you'll always need them!) and tape them together starting with 9 and then decreasing by two each time. You should have 5 levels. Then wrap each layer in pretty paper and tape or glue it on. Hot glue the levels together and with a marker or number stamps, add the numbers 1-25 on the outside of the match boxes. Fill with candy, toys or little fortunes/love notes. It's a really special way to count down to Christmas!