Deck the halls - 19th December 2011

The other day I over heard a man's conversation at the school gates. He was explaining how his wife always decorates the lounge and does it very tastefully and the rest of the house is left to him and he doesn't hold back on the tinsel and decorations, with it ending up rather like a grotto. I quite like that contrast between slightly stylish and tasteless tat. And now that it's the Christmas holidays, I get to spend every day with my crazy over excited children decking the halls with a mixture of beautiful hand crafted traditional decorations and gaudy, glitter encrusted recycled objects de mysterie. The Christmas tree is always left entirely up to the children and is no way colour co-ordinated, themed, vintage or traditional. It is however adorned with decorations that the children have made themselves; salt dough stars, glittered cardboard hearts, wooden peg reindeer. We also have tinsel that has been shredded to tatters by the cats when they were kittens, gold beads that Josie played with as a baby, baubles that Herbie stills knocks off the tree and chases around the lounge. Each year Father Christmas puts a new Christmas tree decoration in both of the children's stockings which truly makes our Christmas tree, a huge family memory display.

So today we put a little bit of ivy around the mirror in the kitchen and added a single crocheted snowflake.

We also made some Christmas trees with strips of lovely paper and even lovelier vintage buttons attached with my glue gun (I do really like my new glue gun and am not really sure how I lived without it.)

And not wanting to get too peckish with all that making, we made some reindeer from pretzels, rolos and raisins with a cherry for Rudolph's red nose. Charlie choose to use a few more raisins and make his a slightly grander affair, he also ate several cherries which was fine by me as pretzels are one of the few things that he doesn't like.

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