First we had the naked tree. Then the musical lights with the store bought, “unusual” ornaments. Then came the homemade construction paper glitter ornaments, followed by another wave of lights — this time flashing LEDs and an “interesting” lighted tube of lights (the blue glowing thing on the tree). We have a power strip tucked up inside the tree to hold all the plugs since none of the strands here plug into each other. Since we have 5 different types of lights on our tree, the non-connecting part didn’t matter anyway.
The final phase of tree decorating this year is the paper chain. I went out and bought a pack of colored construction paper and Carter, Caleb, and I put together a long paper chain tonight to wrap around 2/3s of our tree. The bottom third we’re leaving pretty bare, since Camille already ate several candy canes that turned out to be within her reach. We had to readjust and shuffle everything a few feet up.
Look at this little girl — she holds a pencil correctly. No one ever showed her, she just does it that way naturally. I would wonder if this is one of those “girl things,” but she didn’t get it from me . . . I can barely hold a pencil correctly as an adult.
She is dangerous with the scissors — trying to open and close the blades as fast as she can before mom steps in to ruin her fun.
The finished labor of love.
A friend crocheted this cute little santa for me when she heard we didn’t have any ornaments. Isn’t he awesome?
I’m not big on Christmas decorations (really, holiday decorations in general), but this turned out to be really fun. I didn’t think that putting up a tree would be worth the time and energy and I knew we didn’t need a tree to celebrate Christmas, so I thought this year we would go for the “minimalist” approach. I’m a fan of minimalism because it’s a fancy label to throw out when I don’t feel like trying to impress anyone or when I’m feeling too lazy to drag a 7 foot tree out of the closet under the stairs.
But this minimalist turned out a tree that made all the kids happy and we even got a little crafty in the process. I’m actually considering making stockings this coming week, just for fun. I was going to try and whip some knitted ones out, but I only have sock weight yarn (for those non-knitters that means I have very thin yarn that would take a million stitches to make a stocking-size sock and that would take months, not days) so my alternate plan involves black fabric and something sparkly. Stay tuned for “minimalist Christmas,” part 2.
