It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like . . . Bedlam

It's been a hectic few weeks here at the Posy house. We ended November with a broken clothes dryer and a dicey sewer. The second week of December found our yard populated with plumbers and equipment for three days.

Just what you want in your yard two weeks before Christmas.

Luckily, we did not have to replace our drainage line, despite the fact that it is clay tile that is almost a century old. Our house predates the installation of sewers in our town by a few years, but I'm guessing they got on line fairly soon. The first sewer system in town was completed in 1908. And while they are still intact, those clay tiles allow tree roots to infiltrate everywhere there is a joint. With our big hackberry tree as well as shrubs, etc., our pipes were pretty well clogged with tree roots. That is more than you wanted to know about that, I'm sure, but suffice it to say that it was a big (read expensive) job, so I've told the husband to expect a roll of toilet paper as his Christmas gift. He thinks I'm kidding.

In between appliance deliveries, plumber visits, etc., I have managed to get all my Christmas baking finished. Five types of cookies and also mini peanut butter cakes. None of which I have pictures of because I popped them all into the freezer. I polled the family at Thanksgiving and got two requests for Italian wedding cookies and one for orange chocolate chippers. I also made a batch of cream cheese-walnut cookies, a favorite around here. The new cookies this year both came from the December issue of Country Living magazine: red velvet cookies and triple chocolate hazelnut.

I've been feeling a particular sense of urgency in my Christmas planning this year as I will be away from home the entire week before Christmas. I'm hoping to get home by evening on Christmas Eve if everything goes according to plan -- God willing and the creek don't rise (or, more appropriately, the snow don't fall). So even though, as I told the husband last night, I feel like I'm living on a knife's edge and it won't take much to push me over, it actually is beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

Mini nutcrackers standing guard in the entry hall.

Crafty Christmas Touches

Once upon a time, I was a Christmas decorator at a local house museum.  It was then that I began making Christmas decorations.  A good friend was my decorating partner, and we had some crazy ideas.  Being co-chairs of the event, we even got to foist our crazy ideas onto the other decorators because we chose the themes.  One year was jewel tones. One year we insisted on all blue and silver.  There was some grumbling from decorators that it was more Hanukkah than Christmas, but the house was unique and sparkly.  Another year, we chose a prairie theme.  Now that was unique! We pulled an enormous dead evergreen wreath out of my garage and hung it in the rotunda.  All the needles were still on it and they had turned a marvelous copper color.  We put sheaves of wheat in the windows and tied dried cockscombs to the staircase.  A flower shop created a tree from corn husks for the library, as I remember.  The house was wild.  Visitors either loved it or hated it I guess, but they'd certainly never seen anything like it.

Anyway, being cheap and creative -- as an artist, she is much more more creative than I -- we made a lot of our decorations.  The rooms in the mansion are large with very high ceilings.  What we soon realized, is that large rooms eat your decorations up.  Something that looks huge at home looks puny at the museum.  So we made do.  One year we decorated the maid's room with food.  (I've forgotten what the theme was that year.)  We made cinnamon cookies that we loaded with lots of extra cinnamon for smell, and then decorated with glitter.  Not edible glitter, just glitter.  We also made gumdrop trees.  My daughter was especially fond of those gumdrop trees, so we used them at home the following year or so until they looked mangy, and later made new ones.  This year I found a few old gumdrop trees in the attic.  I don't know how old they are, but they are well past their prime.  Some of the gumdrops were falling off and the color was a little weird too.  But instead of throwing them away, I decided to "frost" them.

Awaiting their finishing touches of fresh greenery.

I am using a lot of white in our dining room this year, which started with the coffee filter wreath I showed you last week. I completed the buffet under the mirror with white Dresden angels my mother passed down to me this year, crystal candle holders with white candles, and a white poinsettia.  I had the idea that I wanted some white trees on top of the hutch on the other side of the room, and here were these old gumdrop trees.  First I gave them a lightish coat of white spray paint.  Spray paint doesn't cover gumdrops all that well, but I wanted some of the original color to show through, so that was okay.  Then I saw Nici at Posed Perfection's blog post about using Epsom salt to frost pine cones. Brilliant! I picked up three pounds of Epsom salt at Walgreen's for less than four dollars.  That's some cheap craft supplies!  I slapped Mod Podge on the gumdrop trees and coated them in Epsom salt.  I like the way they turned out.  I won't be able to save them, but that's okay, they were due for the trash anyhow.

Another little touch of white is my farm animal collection.  I made some of these last year after seeing them on Viva Revival, a great blog by Michelle, a jewelry designer and all-around creative gal.  I made a couple more this year because my little barnyard needed to grow.  Check out Viva Revival for the how to's.

The lighting isn't good, so you can't see that they are sparkly.  

The last item is a picket fence we use to keep Alfie from bumping into the food tree.  The husband made this from inexpensive wooden garden fencing.  We also have a single panel that he put "feet" on that we use to keep Alf out of the living room.  It's much cuter than the old baby gate we used to use!

I can see that I need to center the tree a little better in the fence.

Measuring Out My Days with Coffee Filters

With apologies to T. S. Eliot and J. Alfred Prufrock, I cannot measure out my life with coffee spoons because I don't drink coffee. Recently, however, I measured out a couple of days with coffee filters.

For the last several years, I have hung a white feather wreath on our dining room mirror at Christmastime.  Loved that wreath; I got it at a local gift shop long before feather wreaths were at the big box stores and everywhere else.  With each succeeding year though, the wreath got a little more bedraggled.  This year, I decided sadly that I really shouldn't bring it back out. What to replace it?


I liked the look of some of the coffee filter wreaths I've seen on Pinterest, and it sounded easy, so I got the supplies and got to work.

coffee filters, glue gun, glue sticks, old t-shirt, scissors, straw wreath

No matter how good my iPod playlist is (and, honeychild, I have some good stuff on there), there is a limit to how long at one sitting I can fold and crunch filters and burn my fingers with hot glue, so it took me part of two or three days to complete my wreath.

wrapped in t-shirt strips                                                               the inside edge of glued filters

I'm not going to write a tutorial since there are scads of them online already.  I will just say I used a fourteen-inch straw wreath, which I wrapped with strips of old t-shirt, and about 280 filters.  I started out trying to place the filters in rows like the tutorials suggest, but I wound up just sticking them in as close together as I could, which no doubt explains some of the finger burns.

back of the wreath

After I had glued on as many filters as I could, I trimmed the edges slightly, but my wreath is not perfect.  It's kind of cockeyed, which suits me just fine as I'm a bit cockeyed myself.  I initially planned a ribbon hanger wrapped around the wreath, but soon scrapped that and filled the entire thing with filters.  I attached a length of ribbon to the back with straight pins and hot glue.  I used one of those cool 3M Command hangers directly on the mirror.  In years past, I took the mirror down and hung the feather wreath from a ribbon taped to the back of the mirror.  The 3M hook was so much easier -- love that!

For those of you who have been wondering why I haven't posted lately, I have indeed been busy, but I had also run out of photo space (again!) on Picasa.  I am now trying a Flickr account.  I hope this will be the ticket.

Timber!

We had tough time finding a Christmas tree this year.  On Sunday we drove sixty miles to the tree farm we discovered last year near the Wisconsin border.  The tree farm is 350 acres.  There had to be a tree that was just perfect, but if there was, we didn’t find it.  We trudged for hours.  Too short, bad color, bad shape, too gappy.  It wasn’t just us, either.  We kept seeing the same people wandering around, treeless.  

As we were beginning to wear down, heading into yet another field, we met a man and his son leaving that area empty-handed.   “Any good trees back there?” my husband asked.  “No,” said the man.  “We’re heading across the road.”  There was another, newer area there.  Well, by this time, we were beat.  The fun had begun to wear off, and my son said he didn’t care anymore, we should just get a tree.  So we went into the area forsaken by the man and his son and found a fir that was tall, had good color and shape but, like so many of the trees at the farm, had grown too closely to another tree and had a kind of baldish area on one side.  No problem, we thought, we’ll just put that side in the back.

carnage

At 1:25 Monday morning, Alfie gave a sharp bark and rushed to our bedroom door.  “It’s all right, Alfie,” I murmured.  “Go back to sleep.”  Within seconds, our daughter had rushed to our door.  “Did you hear that crash?” she asked as she turned on our light.  My bleary eyes opened to the glare of the light as the realization hit.  Oh no.  My husband, daughter, and I headed downstairs and, sure enough, the Christmas tree – all nine feet of it – lay on its side on the living room floor.  Water was running across the floorboards to pool by the baseboard.  Broken ornaments littered the rug.  An Old World pocketwatch was shattered, a fabulous pink flamingo wearing a Santa hat was reduced to only a head and neck, several ornaments lost feet, and a number of other glass ornaments were just shards.  

Almost two hours later, the tree was righted, the water was mopped, the glass was cleaned up, and the tree was anchored via fishing line to a nail hastily driven into the window woodwork.  My husband says the baldish area made the tree weighted too heavily to the front, and that’s why it fell over.  That, combined with the heavier ornament count on the front, was enough to do it in.  So now, the tree is leaning drunkenly backward toward the window, but it’s only noticeable from the side.  And, really, who cares?

Luckily, the lights still work and we only lost a relatively small number of ornaments.  The fact that much of the tree hit the living room rug surely helped avert a larger disaster.  We’ve learned an important lesson.  Steer clear of misshapen trees and hedge your bets with some fishing line.

the tree who lived

Pom Pom Garland Deluxe!

A beautiful sight, we're happy tonight, walking in a pom pom wonderland.  Some of you know about my obsession with pom poms.  My pom pom garland is finally finished and hanging on the stairs.  It's a little funky and homespun, but I am thrilled with it.  All my pom pom dreams are fulfilled.

We balanced the garland by making the Currier and Ives children prints that hang on the stair wall into reindeer.  (I love these prints.  They used to hang on the stairs at my in-laws' house.  They are just about my favorite thing.)  Some years, the prints sport bows; one year each child wore a construction paper Santa hat.  This year, my daughter made antlers and felt noses.  I got the idea from Country Living.  They showed the noses and antlers drawn onto picture glass with dry erase markers.  I like our version better since the antlers can extend onto the frames.  Pretty cute, huh?

Cute in a mutant way!

Christmas Tree Traditions

Are you a traditionalist or a game changer at Christmas time?  Growing up, I was in a family of game changers.  The year before I was born, my mother put fiberglass “angel hair” on the Christmas tree.  She had a toddler at the time.  I’m pretty sure that would be against all kinds of safety rules today but, surprisingly, my brother managed to survive it without any lasting damage.  Later, we were the ultimate 1960s family with a silver aluminum tree centered in front of the bow picture window of our 1960s ranch house.  The tree was hung with red Shiny Brite ornaments and illuminated by the requisite rotating color wheel.  I loved that tree!  In the 1970s, after my father retired from the army and we settled down on eleven hilltop acres in Tennessee, my parents often bought live Christmas trees.  And I mean ones to plant in the yard after Christmas.  This meant we couldn’t leave the lights burning on the tree for too long at a time as my parents worried about damaging the tree.  It also necessitated a huge washtub to hold the root ball, which was covered by a white sheet.  By the time my parents moved into a condo, there was a row of gorgeous, two-story-tall white pines along the property line.  It was so amazing to see those giant pines and remember that they were once our Christmas trees.  In addition, we seldom decorated the tree the same way.  One year we covered the tree with silk poinsettias and red ribbons, some years there was shiny tinsel garland, one year I made a garland of ribbon chains.  Even the location changed.  The tree was usually placed in the family room, but sometimes the living room. 

1993

Now I am in a family of hard-core traditionalists.  Even moving the tree to the other side of the living room causes an outcry.  There has been some flexibility on garlands, but the ornaments are always the same (although the collection increases in size every year).  The most longstanding tree tradition in my family, though, is also the best.  We always go to a tree farm and cut down our own tree.  In 1993, when our son (the youngest) was not quite two, we made our first trek to a tree farm.  We had moved from the city to one of the more remote collar counties outside Chicago.  Our friends from the city thought it would be fun for all of us and our little toddlers to cut our own trees.  We had a blast and a tradition was born.  Our friends, on the other hand, had a miserable time and went back to tree lots the following year.

2010

When we moved to our current house, about fifteen years ago, we searched around for the perfect tree farm, and we found it.  It was about 35 miles away and had the absolute best cider donuts you can imagine.  Oh my god, a hot cake donut dusted with cinnamon sugar after a cold tramp around the fields is heaven!  And we always tramp.  We never take the hayride, the wagon, or any other mode of transportation.  Sadly, our favorite tree farm closed in 2009.  Last year, we found a new place.  It is a little further away, and there are no donuts (sigh), but dogs are welcome and, get this, there are reindeer and even a live camel.  I still have more than a week to wait, but I’m really looking forward to heading out to the tree farm.  I just hope it snows.