How do you feel about that?? Only 67 days till Christmas…doesn’t seem so far away, does it? Especially when one thinks about what has to be done between now and then. Time to get your Christmas Notebooks out and get started!
At our house, we start early. We have an annual Open House on the first Sunday in December each year. We put up a lot of decorations and a lot of trees. So, yes, we usually start decorating in October. My sister Genny comes down and gives us a tremendous amount of help each year. I always look forward to getting started!
Last weekend, Genny came and we officially began in the smaller guest room upstairs. This room has a white iron bed, a white country-style armoire and a clean lined, antique, walnut dresser from DH’s side of the family. Though I would prefer to give this room a more relaxed, woodsy, traditional theme, the room has a Victorian style tree. Maybe next year, we’ll switch it up. Right now, we’re on the “get it done” schedule, so the tree we have is the tree we will use. The room used to have a large four poster bed and an ornate antique wardrobe. The Victorian theme was a better fit then. But furniture tends to play musical chairs in our house. During the past few years, our three girls have switched rooms, left home for their own apartments, etc. Now that we seem more settled upstairs, I can decide on better themes for each room. Something to work on during the year, though, not during decorating season.
I had hoped to get the kitty border taken down last summer and the room repainted, but it didn’t get done. Perhaps next summer. The walls are a pale blue and the ceiling a soft yellow. The quilt hanging behind the bed is one I made years ago. It has twenty blocks with a different red Christmas print in each block. I searched quilt stores in three states to get enough different prints. It seems there is more variety available now. Or perhaps it’s just easier to find with the internet available.
As a side note…the iron bed and the other one we have, came from my husband’s family farm. He said they had been stored in the barn for forty or more years. They had been moved to the machine shed for a number of years when we decided to bring them home. I sent them to an auto body repair shop and they sandblasted the beds, then painted them white. The simple designs were beautifully outlined with the white. Here is a picture from 2009 of the other bed.
The smaller bedroom contains the staircase to the attic, so we gave the banister a little garland treatment. The white ball on the newel post is a light. There’s a little chain pull on the side of it. When kids discover that, they get so excited! On, off, on, off, on, off!
The Victorian tree is a seven foot, slender tree. We place it on a round table to give it height. The room has a twelve foot ceiling.
I used gauzy ribbon to tie the bead garland loops to the branches. Those beads are never coming off. They make it to the attic and back down again year after year without having to be redone.
Last weekend, after Genny left, my middle daughter and I decorated this tree in the upstairs hall. It holds pictures of our children and grandchildren from Christmases past. The beads for this tree are necklaces the girls have collected at parades in the area. We drape them on the tree, from limb to limb. They make a colorful addition to the tree.
This weekend, we worked in the downstairs bedroom. This room is in the 1960 addition to the house, so the ceilings are eight feet here. The tree features silver and blue ornaments, some Putz houses, and a sprinkle of icicles. The topper is a variety of picks that are poked into the top of the tree. The silver bead garland and the LED lights stay on the tree during storage. To keep the beads on the tree, I turn the tip of the branch back over the garland and that holds it in place. We are blessed with a third floor attic with plenty of room to store our trees upright. DH puts a large plastic tree bag over them to keep the dust off while they are in the attic. This tree was highlighted with silver spray paint. More about that at this link: Thanks, HGTV!
We need to decide what we’re going to do on the top of the bookcase behind the tree. On the top shelf of the bookcase, our Heartwood Creek nativity is displayed. It went on top the book case last year, but we might do something different this year, leaving the nativity where it is.
To the left of the blue and silver tree, we placed the two pieces I have of a Christmas village that was going to be produced for the town I grew up in. Only these two pieces were made, the county courthouse and the county jail, then the idea was scrapped for some reason. This picture is from last year. Looks just the same this year. 🙂
The white Putz tree is also in this bedroom. I confess I left it up all year because I liked it so much. It just needs a little tweaking. Read more about this tree and the little Putz houses at this link: The Putz Tree.
To the left of the Putz tree is a lowboy dresser on which I display some vintage Putz buildings. The houses were given to me by my daughter-in-law.
Above the lowboy hangs an antique post office mailbox cubbyhole shelf. My older daughter brought me a box of vintage bubble lights a year ago and I display them on top the cubby.
DH brought down all the Christmas storage boxes for the addition, which includes the bedroom, the hall, the laundry room and the bathroom. Genny and I decorated the garden tree in the bathroom, and the rest of the addition is waiting to be done. There are a couple of cardinals to add to the garden tree, but we haven’t put them on yet. Again, a picture from a previous year, but looks the same this year. We may forego the poinsettias this year, though.
That’s what we’ve accomplished so far! I’ll keep you posted. There may be 67 days until Christmas Day, but we have only 48 days left to prepare for the Open House!
~~Rhonda