Christmas Decor

This is our first Christmas in our new house since we closed on the purchase December 29 last year after spending the holidays at my mom's after vacating our Wisconsin apartment. 

I have enjoyed using all our old favorite decorations as well as making and finding new ones to spruce up the home.  There are several more pieces I would love to add to our collection, but I have yet to find them for an affordable price and/or have yet to find time to tweak them... So I'm sure our Christmas decor will evolve a bit each year for the next several years as we spread out.

First I'll share a project I made.  Well....part of it, anyway.  I started with 3 styrofoam cones from Michael's.  This is the largest of the 3 I had, about 12 inches high.  

I cut out about a million felt circles in 3 shades of green.  (Ok, so it was as many circles that were each about 1.5inches as I could get out of 6 8.5x11 sheets of felt...2 of each shade of green). I also cut out some smaller 3/4 inch circles from a deep cranberry/maroon color felt.

I gathered the circles by folding them in half and/or bunching them into rosettes and pinning them into the foam core with ball-head straight pins.

After making my way all the way up...just in time, too, as I used every last felt circle I had cut, and I just barely got it covered, I decided that I couldn't handle cutting out more felt circles to cover the other 2 (smaller) tree cores. 

One tree, I covered with ruffled red fabric that I pinned onto the smallest cone; the third (medium sized) cone was covered with a beautiful gray/sparkly yarn I found at Michael's that has sequins scattered along the threads for a little sparkle.

(I have a detailed picture of the yarn-wrapped tree, but for some reason, Blogger keeps Error-ing out when I try to upload it.  Bummer!)

As for the rest of the decor, here are some of my favorite touches.  We also have a live wreath with mini apples on it from Costco, but I haven't taken a photo of it...or any of our outdoor decor.  I should probably do that tomorrow!

Our mantel: layered evergreen and amaryllis wreaths (total spent only $4.99 on the amaryllis and $1.99 on the evergreen thanks to a Target gift card and a sale at Michael's!).  I also clipped some holly from our trees outdoors, displayed some snowmen we've had for years, including the "Snowplace like Home" snowman plaque I painted before we got married and moved to Wisconsin, our trees (above) and a Louisville Stoneware nativity scene plate that belonged to my Mimi when I was a little girl.  

 An ornament from our 2008 trip to Disney World....officially our "Second Honeymoon," but really our "Real Honeymoon" since our 2005 post-wedding trip was not so much relaxing what with bear tracks around the house, a 7 hour re-routed drive through Wyoming due to an avalanche, and lost luggage!

For those who don't know, Hubbs and I met while studying abroad with our college in the same group in London.  Our British themed ornaments are our faves!

Baby's First Christmas 2009 for our oldest son!

Our son left some cookies and eggnog out for Santa....he dropped the plate a few times on his way from the kitchen to the tree, but Santa doesn't mind cookie pieces, we assured him!

Our son's hand-print at his first Christmas when he was just 6 months old!

A view up our tree from the floor!

Starbucks red cup season -- need I say more?  Yumm!!!

Poinsettias were only $0.99 at Home Depot yesterday!  I hope I can keep them alive a while!

Holly clipped from our trees adorns our mantel and our dining table.  Next year I hope we also have a freshly planted young magnolia tree so that I can mix in clippings from that tree as well!

Merry Christmas, Everyone!!