Making Traditions

As I was decorating for Christmas something felt different.  I realized that this is our third December here in the Bitterroot, but really only our second holiday season.  The first year we went back to Portland for the week of Christmas and didn't really do any decorating at the house, so 2013 was really our first Christmas in our new home. When decorating this year, I realized that I was putting a lot of things "where they go" for the first time.  It was a bit odd, but also comforting: we're starting our new traditions in our new home and not just the things you consciously decide will be traditions, but they things that just naturally reoccur and make themselves your traditions.  It's nice.

That said, there's not much to photograph and share.  I may as well, just insert a link to last year's posts about holiday decorating.*  So instead, I'll just post a few of the new decorations or new ways we used "old" decorations.

Last year I started using my silver tinsel tree just for my Kermit the Frog ornaments, but I didn't have a tree skirt.  Eric let me use the Kermit collar from a childhood costume his mom made to make this skirt!

I decided to use the gold tinsel tree as a pet tree.  We have foot prints for Olive, Ella, Betty, and Delia and a blown glass ornament representing Pearl that was given to me years ago by a dear friend.  I'm going to need a tree skirt here, too. Hmmm.

Last year's ornament wreath has found a home on the new fence!  Right at the bottom of the driveway.  And yes, that's about as white of a Christmas as we may have. The heck?

Now we have some Santa action: the nutcracker is for Eric's childhood and the Santa mug was given to me by my grandmother; this year I bleached and dyed the bottle brush tree hat.

I was lucky enough to host some crafty friends for some bottle brush tree crafts the first weekend of December. I had plans of taking lots of photos, but instead I just had lots of fun. Sometimes you gotta just live in the moment rather than capturing the moment for posterity.  These are part of my results from that day.  I'm truly bummed I didn't get photos of what my friends made, because there was some serious awesome going on!

My first complete bottle brush tree project.  Bleached and "snowed" and set into a thrift store salt shaker and inserted into a 2-quart blue mason jar.  It goes great with all the other aqua trees!

I used some thrift store brass candle sticks as bases for a trio of trees for our '70s-inspired bathroom. They sit in the window sill and wit the back lighting I wasn't able to get a decent shot.

This year we added Krampus to our "alternatree"!

I think that this decoration is only partly done. I have ideas, but haven't figured out exactly how to execute them, but in the meantime we have a bunch of candy canes hanging on our clothes line!  Sadly, this snow is long gone.

We're preparing ourselves for the disappointment of a non-white Christmas, but... there is still hope!

Lately the weather has been rather Portland-like and dangit, I WANT SNOW!

* see what I did there?