I may have not done my Christmas shopping on time but I did manage to get a Christmas Tree and decorate the house the best I could. To keep with tradition, the BF and I cut down our own Christmas Tree again. If you have never experienced cutting down your own Christmas tree then you need to, its such a blast! We actually look forward to it! I mean how exciting it is to walk around and look at tons and tons of trees and never like the ones Zach picks out, and he finds flaws in all the trees I pick out, but then after all the bad apples we can both come to an agreement that we finally found the perfect tree, or finally got tired enough of looking and decided to settle, either way I love it! Tis the season, right! There is this great little place located off HWY 6 in Manvel, Holiday Acres. Once you arrive, you load up on a hay ride and they take you out to the field or farm of Christmas trees. They drop you off with a long PVC pole, so you have something to measure your tree with before you cut it down (Unless you are Clark Griswold and don't care how big the tree is), and a hand saw, no chainsaws here, you do the work, or should I say you watch your man do the work! Now the fun part, endless walking of lots and lots of trees until you find the perfect one for your home! I like to think I hear the glorified Hallelujah music with the tree sending off a glow once I see the perfect one, like something out of a movie, silly I know but it puts me more in the spirit of the season! I would say it took us about 40 minutes or so for us to pick out our beauty! Zach cut it down with such grace! I watched! Well I did push on the tree once he cut it about half way down to help it go down easier, so I wasn't a complete waste, I did have a job! After it is cut I have Zach cut another piece of the stump off, I like to make an ornament with the wood piece to hang up on the tree to remember each tree and the year, just a nice little sentimental thing to hang on the tree. I bought a wood burning tool so I could use it just for that! Once you cut it down you drag it to one of the main paths and they come to pick you back up on the hay ride. They then take your tree and shake it for you and wrap it. While they are doing this you can enjoy the free hot cocoa or hot apple cider and take a look in their barn with items they have for sale. They have ladies here that make wreaths from the branches of the trees and they are absolutely gorgeous! This place is super cute and bring your camera, lots of great areas to take pictures! Once our tree was finished we paid for it and the nice man even loaded our tree up and we headed home to begin decorating!
This here is the Wood Burning tool I bought at Michaels to make the ornaments. It works really well, and be careful, this thing gets hotter than hot! I put eye hooks on the top of each wood piece to be able to string it and hang to the tree. I drew what I wanted first then just went over it with the wood burner. I decided one should be a snowflake and the other a few Christmas Trees. Just so simple and looks so nice! Zach even helped a little, don't mind his sweat pants and old man house shoes!
The Christmas Tree set the mood for all the other decorating we did around the house. I am excited to share some of my decorating with you guys. I only decorated the living room and the kitchen bar. I think over the years I will eventually have enough stuff to decorate every crevice of the entire house in some sort of Christmas decor. I mean if I could I would leave up the Christmas decorations all year, it just looks and feels so nice in the home! We didn't get around to decorating the outside of our house, we really wanted to but no time, theres always next year! I did make a wreath for the front door so at least one festive thing on the outside!
I love deer and reindeer and use it a lot in my holiday decorating. When I saw this Rudolph wreath I knew I had to make it for myself. This wreath is just so cute that you guys won't believe just how simple and easy it was to make. I followed these directions here on how to make a Burlap wreath. After making the wreath I glued a red glass ornament towards the bottom, made a bow from red ribbon I had and glued two leaf arrangement things found at Michaels in the Christmas section to use for antlers. I tied a piece of string to the back so I could hang it to my front door and ta-da, Rudolph!! This took a whole whooping 30- 45 minutes to make I think and I don't think I even spent over 10 dollars! I am pretty proud of how it turned out!
As for my inside decorating, I tried to really make the fireplace and mantle pop with a rustic feel! Hello!!, I mean the name says it all, "LIVING RUSTIC"!! On my mantle I already had this window mirror, that I would like to say was purchased at Consign-It in Pearland! As a little side note I did mention Consign-It earlier in my post and I purchased many things from there to decorate my home! Please follow them on Facebook to see the deals they have and go check out the store, I promise they won't disappoint! I purchased this green wreath from HomeGoods to add to the mirror. They had so many to choose from that it was very hard to choose just which one I wanted to go with! I added the lighted garland that came from Hobby Lobby to the edge so I could have something cute to have the stockings branching from. I made our stockings from simple plain burlap stockings. I made bows for each one then added a metal letters Z and R for our names to each one. All of my supplies came from Hobby Lobby and not hard to make at all. As for the other things on the mantle those are items that will be staying after Christmas is over and worked in with some of my other ideas I have for the space, but we will get to that In January! Next to the fireplace I have my two deer that I just adore. The one of the right stays there after Christmas, its brass and I knew when I saw it I had to have it! Guess you can't guess where I got it from! If you guessed Consign-It, then you are right. the wooden cola crate, metal lantern and metal tin planter that my flower arrangement it in also came from there! My flower arrangement if from Hobby Lobby. I added some of that green foam stuff to the planter then just started poking all my flowers in it. I also added some of the branches from when we trimmed the Christmas Tree to it too. My deer on the left side came from T.J. Maxx, and goes great with all the other rusticness! We have pine trees that overlap into our backyard so I decided to use some of those annoying pine cones that end up all over the place in my decorating. I added them to my lantern and also to an apple basket I have sitting on my kitchen bar. I even spray painted just a few Christmas colors to give a little extra pop of color. The resin star is just a decorating piece we have had and has been all over the place to sitting on tables to being on the wall and now propped up in my Christmas display, this also came from Hobby Lobby.
The photo above shows that I did a tiny bit of decorating to the dining table. I added a cute little tree and place mats that I found at HomeGoods and well thats about it here in this area. Well there is also a lone Reindeer on the Hutch that my mom gave me and not sure where she got it from. We still haven't decorated this area yet so its still in the works, tune in to the blog after Christmas because this will be my next decorating project to tackle.
I don't know what it is but even growing up I never liked tree skirts. Weird, I know. Maybe its the name, Tree Skirt! I don't know but I don't like them, even the rustic looking burlap ones! So I knew last year when we bought a tree that I wasn't going to use one. So I had to think what else could I use, I couldn't just have an ugly Christmas Tree Stand sitting there! Last year while at Lowes I saw all the Galvanized buckets in the gardening section and knew that would be perfect to hold my tree. I just place the tree stand in the bucket and thats all there is to it! Simple, cute and no tree skirt, well at least no fabric tree skirt!
As for the tree decorations, no real theme just a nice rustic feel with browns and reds and turquoise, so I guess it does have a little theme. Every year we buy a few more ornaments. We have so much fun going to the stores and looking through them all and picking out ornaments for ourselves and each other. Zach tends to pick out anything with cats on it for myself and I tend to pick out the cat ones for him too just simply because I know he hates cats. This year we added a few new ones that I love. Zach is especially very proud of his mustache ornament, and yes its front and center on the tree, all his doing, its his way to help decorate I guess!
After making dinner one night, we decided to get more into the spirit of the holiday and make cookies! I bought these really cute cookie cutters and wanted to put them to use. Well I forgot that you have to freeze the cookie dough so my idea of using the cookie cutters actually turned into a bad mess so we decided to put the cookie cutters on hold for another day and instead just make rounded cookies for the time being. I just used the basic store bought Pillsbury Sugar Cookie Roll that you can find at any grocery store, rolled the dough into small balls and then we rolled them in different Christmas sugars and candy! Nothing says Christmas like Christmas cookies!! They looked so yummy that I couldn't wait for them to bake! The smell from the baking that filled our house was the best smell ever. After baking and cooling we broke out our cute Santa Mugs, Zach enjoyed Cocoa while I had tea and yes we went to town on those cookies! Needless to say they tasted just as yummy as they looked!
Since I showed you my Santa Mugs I also wanted to share with you some great coffee and syrup I found at Home Goods that will also put you into the Christmas spirit. One word, GINGERBREAD! Maybe its just me that gets so excited for the season of gingerbread! I love it! People can get all excited about their pumpkin spice, well I get excited for gingerbread flavored anything!! The syrup is sugar free and calorie free, Score! There is also other Skinny Syrups out there if you aren't a Gingerbread fan like myself. Its great because all I add is the syrup and I am set!
Hope you enjoyed the decorating I did, stay tuned for a blog to come with Christmas activities that we have been up to!
