Celebrating Christmas
Hi, and welcome to our festive holiday home! Here you will find some great ideas to help get your house ready for Christmas. Hopefully this will inspire you to have new and exciting decorating ideas for next year!
I always love to have messages around the home. This one I especially love to bring out around Christmas. I bought this 'Dear Santa, I can explain' sign years ago and has been with our family for over a decade. Every year I smile when we hang it up; as it's so true! This year was hilarious because our 5 year old asked what this sign means...how do you explain that?!
Living wreaths and ones made of natural fibers or organic material decorate the inside of our home and bring our house to life with the Christmas Spirit. These are just a few that can be seen when you enter our home.
No room is left behind when decorating for Christmas. Our powder room receives special treatment. Here you will find floating vases with reindeer moss and pine cones, felt Christmas trees and copper candles with spruce and rosemary scents.
Interesting tidbit : Reindeer moss is white living moss, easily found at any florist, just ask. You can get two handfuls for about $5. It's inexpensive and lasts forever.
Interesting tidbit : The hand soap and cream are from the Perth Soap Company (https://perthsoap.com/). This stuff is truly incredible. Not only does it smell out of this world but this cream literally cured my eczema. Even though it is scented, it is all natural. I have tried everything from prescription cortisone creams to coconut oil, you name it and this cream (in any scent) completely cleared it up.
Of course our Christmas tree is the most fun. Every year we head out to a local tree farm (http://www.hillcresttreefarm.com/) and cut down our own tree; a family tradition. Once we have it setup and the lights put on, we host a tree decorating party. In the early days, our friends were responsible to bring over a decoration to put on the tree. Nowadays, we have so many that they don't always all make it out of the box. As our family grew and our friends families grew, the tree decorating has been taken over by the children. They have a great time discovering the wildly different decorations that we have collected over the past thirty years!
And what would Christmas be without some baking and imagination. This year, we baked over 85 dozen cookies for our friends and customers in one day. We had over 9 different varieties from macaroons to Jewish shortbread. And of course ones with chocolate and candy canes made it into the tins.
I am thankful for my friend that claims she wouldn't miss this marathon baking for the world...I couldn't do it without her. This was our 9th year! Once the cookies are loaded into my car, my daughter and I spend the day delivering Christmas cheer.
A great tradition that we also do in our family is bake a cake for baby Jesus. Grandma and Auntie help put this together each year. The kids love to participate and sing happy birthday on Christmas day. Who doesn't like to blow out candles!
Our children also love to plant candy cane seeds and watch them grow into a field of peppermint! A wonderful idea to help countdown the days until Christmas Day.
Interesting tidbit : Get a bowl full of white sugar to plant white Tic-Tacs in. Our Elf-on-the-shelf delivers the 'seeds' in a pouch each year. To show the candy canes growing we like to use broken pieces to poke out of the sugar at first, then small candy canes and finally big ones that can be picked.
From our family to yours, may you have a wonderful, loving holiday season.
Cheers,
Wendy