Christmas Notebook

I’ve been meaning to post but am so busy that, by the time I can, I am too tired to think about it. But I’ll take a stab at it now and see if I can get something coherant up. As most of you know, this is the busiest time of year for us. We are focused on getting the house ready for our annual Christmas Open House. It takes a lot of work and a lot of coordinating of what we’re doing.

Today, DH worked on the 9′ living room tree. We’ve had incandescent lights on it for years. The past few years we have had trouble with it blowing a fuse, so this year we are moving to LED lights on this tree. Not a happy choice for me, because I think colored LEDs are a bit garish and bright. But it’s a big tree and needs a lot of lights, so I am willing to make the change. Besides, burning the house down doesn’t seem like a good trade off.

Because we aren’t having the upstairs open this year for the party, we are juggling some of the trees around. We won’t be using the second 9′ tree for the nativity tree in the library this year and it is already strung with LEDs, so we’ll use that in the living room. I took all the lights off the first 9′ tree and we stored the tree without lights. If we need it another year, we can string it with LEDs. I will miss the incandescents.

In the afternoon, a friend stopped by to help me string popcorn and cranberries for the living room tree. It was great to have time to chat and catch up with her. We managed to string four and a half bags of cranberries (out of six needed for the tree). A second friend stopped by unexpectedly and she gave us a hand, too. It’s a good feeling to have that much of the project done. I’ll finish the rest tomorrow or Friday.

I have been asked to put some of my Putz houses and Christmas ornaments in a new gift shop opening locally, so I am going through my inventory and deciding what to send over for that. I am also trying to make some new inventory so I don’t have to take too much out of my Etsy ChristmasNotebook shop.

A friend stopped by to pick up a special order today. She wanted three yellow and grey houses on one base to use below a table top tree. Nothing green. The ivory colored bottle brush trees were perfect for this project. I am very happy with the way it turned out.

I finished this little Putz house this week and it is posted to my Etsy shop.

I also made this little house. I like it so much that I’m keeping it for myself. But I will be making a few houses in that color to post to Etsy.

I finished the little autumn house.

My dear friend Marsha and her husband visited last Thursday. Marsha and I crafted and Paul watched soccer. He grew up in Brazil so loves the sport. It is always refreshing to visit with them and I enjoyed the day a great deal. Totally forgot to take pictures, though! I did take this picture the night before their visit.

And that is about as clear as my craft counter ever gets. So it’s good to invite friends over. Gives incentive to tidy up!

~~Rhonda

It isn’t very often that both my dear daughters-in-law are able to visit us in the same week. Younger Son’s wife was here for the wedding of her cousin and was able to stop by on her way back to the airport on Monday. It was wonderful to see her and to spend a couple of hours catching up. She was delighted to hug Winston and tell him how fluffy he was. Younger Son was not able to come, but they should both be back for Christmas. We are looking forward to that. The last time we saw them was last Christmas!

I decided to make an autumn Putz house, so began to work on that this week.

I had to remake the chimney three times to get it to fit correctly. Now I have to decide how I am going to embellish it without using snow.

Genny does most of the chalking on the chalkboard Christmas tree and she will be back this weekend to finish it, but I did a little work on it myself this week. I added some Christmas lights and some snow.

Older Son’s wife is here for a few days to help with the Christmas decorating. We started in the kitchen by taking down all the pie plates and washing them. She also washed the wall and the pegs the curtains hang from. And put up the Christmas curtains. Then we put the snowflake ornaments on the garland which DH had already put up in the windows.

The blue and silver tree in the downstairs bedroom is done except for the tree skirt and the tinsel. Both will wait as they serve as cat magnets and we don’t need that problem right now.

Clark and Winston were very helpful.

The aluminum tree in the bedroom is also done. It’s pretty simple so didn’t take long to put up.

I made the centers for Chocolote Peanut Butter Truffles. I’ll dip those in chocolate, then freeze them till right before the Open House. Then they will be dipped in white almond bark and topped with some cookie sprinkles. A picture from the past…2007 to be exact…

The next step is fluffing and decorating several trees. Back to work!

~~Rhonda

We have done a chalkboard tree for the Christmas season the past four years. This will be our fifth one. The first one was based on one I saw online. Our chalkboard is eight feet tall. The ceilings are twelve feet. Lots of room to play!

The second tree was done with a “Twelve Days of Christmas” theme and featured two of our cats.

Our third tree was a nativity theme. I love the city at the bottom of the tree.

Last year the tree was decorated with toys.

This year I wanted a vintage feel, so I googled “children christmas vintage coloring pages” and got a lot of great ideas. I printed off the ones I liked and my sister and I decided which ones to use for this year’s tree. The biggest job is transferring them to the chalkboard. Genny found some white graphite paper and used that. It worked very well. After all the pictures had been transferred, the chalking began.

This is as far as she got before she had to leave.

It takes many hours to chalk the entire tree, counting the transferring of patterns. We plan to add a border of Christmas tree lights, too. Stay tuned for more pictures!

~~Rhonda