We never really used to decorate too much for Christmas. We’d have the tree, and our stockings would come out Christmas Eve, and if it happened to occur to someone, we got a wreath as well. These days, since my parents have retired, they get a bit more into it. Last year, because they were down in NYC visiting Ando’s family, it was up to the Pie and I to decorate the house for the holiday season. This was the first year that my mother had let my dad put up white LED lights in the bushes outside (something he’s been wanting to do for thirty years, though I’m still holding out for the animatronic Santa on the roof). So I knew we could go a bit more out there than we had in previous years.
The idea was to work with what we had, and my parents have collected a vast number of Christmas tree decorations in their almost forty years together. So I took the biggest glass balls and suspended them from scrap ribbons tied to the banister on our upstairs landing.
Coming down the stairs you can see your reflection in the closest ones.
And the view from the bottom.
Some of the more oddly shaped and heavier glass balls I looped around the curtain rod in the dining room.
Then I took a garland that came from Ten Thousand Villages and some paper IKEA decorations and did this to the window in the living room.
For a wreath, I picked this one up at Value Village for $2.50.
I pulled the artificial stuff off it and sprayed the actual grape vine underneath a nice bright copper.
Then the Pie and I went to Canadian Tire and went through their clearance decoration bin — this is where they sell off the bits of stuff that fell off other stuff the year before. We picked up a few wreath embellishments for about $2.40 in total, and I sprayed some silver.
Other bits we bought were already copper.
The finished product is simple, easy, and cheap, and cost me less than five bucks (I forgot to take a picture of it until AFTER I’d hung it up between the two doors). And all those decorations can just be pulled out and reused somewhere else if I feel like changing it up next year.
So you don’t have to spend a million dollars to create some winter wonderland. Simple accents here and there can also express the holiday season in the same way!
Ali Does It Herself 