Oh, Christmas Tree!

Hello peeps!

10 days to Christmas! Are you ready? I'm not. But then again, I'm pretty much never ready, so that's not saying much.

I did manage to festiv-ify the house! It took me nine days, partially because of the munchkins and partially because I went semi-crazy and decided I needed to make *nine thousand paper stars.

*slight exaggeration.

They're up, though!

Part of the reason it took so long was because we had a Christmas tree crisis the day after Thanksgiving. I was all set to use the artificial pre-lit 6.5 foot tree from last year. Then Grover suddenly decided it was too small. I absolutely refuse to buy a new one for full price when they'll be 75 percent off in a few weeks, so I checked Craigslist and found a 7.5 foot tree for $20! It wasn't prelit, but that was no big deal (or so I thought).

We yanked the tree out of the box and realized to our dismay it was the scraggliest little thing we'd ever seen. I, of course, forgot to take a picture, but believe me when I say it was baaaad. Luckily, we had another disassembled tree sitting in the garage that matched almost exactly. I stuffed single branches from that tree into the holey spots. I don't know where it came from, but it saved us.

After that little fiasco, I attempted to string the lights. First time I've ever done this, mind you.

I failed.

I'm not at all embarrassed to admit I left it like this for two days.
After I finally got around to redoing it, I was a little burned out. I haphazardly added a bunch of random stuff from our Christmas boxes (there's like five of them ... it's kind of ridiculous) - feathers, white, gold and silver balls, crocheted snowflakes (I didn't make them), gold ribbon, bells, salt dough ornaments from last year, some pine cones, and white ting tings.

Behold the randomness!
Normal people would have stopped, but I thought it was missing something, so I tied together all my scraps of eyelet trim and lace and wrapped them around the tree, too. Then I decided it was STILL missing something, so I made a gazillion paper stars. I used old sheet music from a book that fell apart, encyclopedia pages, regular printer paper and scrapbook paper.

If I can get G to stop ripping them off the tree, I might even be able to save them and reuse them next year.

FINALLY, I added some wired ribbon (scored on eBay for $5!!!).

It's definitely a hodge podge (Grover called it "busy" ... once), but I like the overall effect. Our life is kind of a hodge podge right now, so it fits.

Once the tree was done, I hung more paper stars from the bookshelves with jute twine ...

... stuck them in a garland ...

... and used them to decorate the tiny tree.

And just in case you weren't already thinking, "whooooaaaa, Nelly", I sprinkled little gold and silver ornaments and pine cones around the house ...

... put a wreath on the door ...

... and decorated a table top tree with vintage ornaments (it's actually the top third of the tree we used to beef up Scraggly McScraggleson).

This one is my favorite:

Bahahahaha ...
If it took nine days to put them up with two kids running around, I wonder how long it's going to take when there's three of them ...
: P