Christmas . . . there are no tacky decorations

Christmas . . . there are no tacky decorations

Christmas is the only holiday you can’t do wrong. That’s right. You can’t do Christmas wrong. Unless, of course, you don’t do Christmas. That would be wrong. And sad.

But, there are no wrong Christmas decorations. Nothing bad. Nothing ugly.

It’s all in the eyes of the beholder and love is blind. How else can we explain those certain someones in our past? We thought they were great . . .  until the blinders were off.

But, as far as Christmas, we pretty much keep our blinders on. Pass a house all decorated up and what do we say? “Oh, look, they’re really in the Christmas spirit!” And we stop to ooh and aah.

When the kids were little, each year we piled in the car to go scouting out those really in the Christmas spirit. The more lights, the better.

Yesterday, I waited in line at the cashier behind a lady buying turquoise and silver pine straw glued to a stick at the hobby store. With shiny little orange balls. They were cute. Sort of. When would I ever think that color combo would work?

And then you have to store all that stuff. Garlands, trees, balls, lights, Santas, and angels. They all have to go some place until next year. Which got me to thinking. Wouldn’t it be nice to use greenery you can toss and just add a few lights and permanent decorations? I could feel myself getting all earthy and leave-a-small-footprint and reduce-the-landfill. The aura was palpable.

As I mentioned, we moved this year and my guy and I looked long and hard at our accumulations and did some serious culling. I’m married to the world’s best Finder/we-could-use-this-in-an-apocolypse/horder.  And he is married to the best I-must-save-these-memories-of-their-childhood/keeper. I had ten . . . that’s right, 10 (maybe more, but I’m not sure) large tubs of toys and clothes from the kids’s childhood. He had a garage and attic of tools, dehydrators, water purifiers, and 5-pound cans of dried beans, pasta, potatoes, and rice left from Y2K that never happened.

This year has been a major clearing out of stuff. I’ve found it exhilarating. Sort of. Some of that stuff was so valuable. Why toss out those sweet little cowboy boots? They’d make a cute lamp in a child’s room one day. Except the owner of those little boots grew up and had two girls. Who like pink. And the heels were separating from the foot bed and the leather had split. Salvageable, but not really worth the effort.

Back to my thought . . .  real greenery.

Three of our grand-kids spent the weekend with us a couple of weekends ago. We went foliage foraging.

With all that’s been going on with the remodel, moving, not to mention my guy’s health issues, we’ve been kind of busy . . . and without little kids at home and no one coming here for the holidays, we decided to skip a tree. But I didn’t want us to not have any Christmas spirit.

The kids and I put together this little pot. What I like best is the Christmasy feel and the non-Christmasy feel it has.

There are two best parts of this. No three.

One. It was fast and easy. Assembly took less than 30 minutes.

Two. It’s economical. All of the major pieces were free. Found when we foraged.

Remember all the publicity about how beautiful Princess Diana was? I always thought she was attractive. But, I also remember reading that her wardrobe, hair, shoes, and makeup cost $10,000 a month. That doesn’t count the jewels she wore. I wonder how we’d all look if $120,000 were spent on our looks each year.

Three. There’s no storage after the season ends. If it gets droopy, out it goes. The only permanent things here are the pot, lights, and metal arch.

We filled a clay pot with sand dug from the yard. Working from back to front, we stuck in the tall sticks. Then, the metal arch. Then, the drift wood. Go for an asymmetrical look.  Nature’s not balanced. She’s a free spirit.

From our foraging, we had 6-8 pine and cedar sprigs. These were about 12-20 inches. The lower leaves were pulled off leaving a stem to insert into the sand. We used a total of 5 sprigs. I put a few on the back side. Even though it’s not viewed on all sides, you see it from the side and that made it look fuller.

My grandson found the tall stick lying in the woods. It’s a cedar that had fallen over and moss and lichens had grown all over it.

I collect pieces of drift wood to use for later projects. If you don’t have drift wood, any interesting sticks would work.

Add moss to cover up bare spots.  And the lights go on last.

It’s been sitting outside on our porch in the weather for almost three weeks now. I’ve watered it a couple of times and it’s been rained on. I expected the moss and lichens to dry up and fall off. They didn’t. It looks as good as it did the day we made it.

We’re all in the Christmas spirit.

Merry Christmas!