A Vintage Thrify Christmas

New Christmas decorations are nice, I guess, but I much prefer old ones. Especially from the 1950's, and the 1960's too. Atomic decorations, kitchy decorations... I just love them. And so Goodwill and Value Village fueled my need to add to my decoration collection this year.  Here is a sampling of what I found:

pretty little angel ornament

homemade snowflakes

love this old santa

did your grandma have one of these?

my kids call this "creepy santa"

angel in my kitchen

pretty christmas mug...

and it has my name on it!!

my grandma had this set and used it at christmas

Christmas Crafts

Thanks to the emergence of Pinterest in this past year, I have become a bit obsessed with crafts. Especially Christmas crafts. I think it was sometime in July that I started a board for holidays, and it is filled with crafts for Christmas. I used to think of crafts as things like those wooden bead necklaces that your elementary school teachers wore, but I've come to realize that crafts can be modern, bright, and much more inexpensive than buying something at the designer stores. 

I have always liked ornament wreaths-- so bright and shiny and pretty. I saw one a few weeks back at Target for about $25, but I knew that I could make one for less than that. I had a foam wreath form from a rummage sale waiting to be used, so I gathered all of my unused ornaments and my glue gun. I also found a little wooden sign at the dollar store that I added to the top. I began by gluing on the largest ornaments and I just kept adding the smaller ones around and on top of the bigger ones until it looked complete.

There are still some areas of foam wreath peeking through, but I'll just head back to the dollar store and pick up a few extra ornaments.

I also had foam trees from the same rummage sale, so I decided to make ribbon trees. Michaels had lots of wired ribbon on sale on Black Friday, so each tree cost about $2.50 to make-- 50 cents for each tree form and about $2 of ribbon on each tree. I simply cut pieces of ribbon in approximately 5 inch lengths, and then I folded them in half and glued them around the tree from bottom to top.

These crafts were lots of fun and took the span of a Christmas movie to complete. Plus, the kids (well, Harper anyway) loved helping. Harper cut the ribbon for the trees while I glued it on.

Now, back to Pinterest for more craft inspiration!

Christmas Tree Quest 2011

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, we went on our annual Christmas tree quest. We go to Tiger Mountain in Issaquah to a particular farm, but when we arrived, they had a big sign on the barn that said....
"NOBLE FIRS--SOLD OUT"
Not sure how you can be sold out 2 days after Thanksgiving, but oh well... there were plenty of other farms that we could check out in the area.
We happened upon a farm way off the beaten path-- while attempting to follow the signs to it we thought we were lost, but nope-- it was just way out in the boonies. The farm was called "Crystal Creek", and wow, was it pretty! They had Christmas music playing over loud speakers and fields of beautiful Noble Firs.

We started looking in one field, then went to the middle field, then to the right field, and then all the way back to where we started again.

There were little trees, huge trees, and trees with a peek-a-boo space in the middle...

In some areas, the trees were so close together, you could barely walk between them...

Finally, we found the one--

Everyone had to take a turn sawing it down!

While Daddy put the tree on the van roof, we played with the nice farm dogs and rode on an old train car thingy that the owner of the farm had restored.

The owner of the farm, the nice gentleman pictured above in the engineer's cap, gave the kids rides. He said that if we come back next year, he will have his trolley up and running, and will give us a ride on that too.