What do reindeer use to decorate their Christmas trees?

Horn-aments….  I love bad puns.

Anyway, we were feeling festive this weekend and decided to get all of our Christmas decorations out and get the house ready.  I have been excited for Christmas for awhile now, it’s the first time we get to decorate our very own house!  Steve bought a Christmas tree 4 Christmas’ ago (right after we started dating) and I still love it.  It’s artificial but has very real looking branches.  He scored a mega deal on it at Ace Hardware, it was 80% off after Thanksgiving (and no, we never buy seasonal decorations before the holiday actually happens).  We have red and white bulbs (it’s Husker town after all) and then fill in the rest with meaningful ornaments from our childhood.

and yes, Kirby will spend all of Christmas in that very spot.

I had a tree as well, mine was much smaller and we decided to set that one up in our dining room.  We figured 1) it would look nice from the street and 2) maybe we’d be distracted by the pretty bulbs and not notice that we still need to finish mudding the drywall.  This tree has a purple theme.  Our wedding colors were purple and silver and we were originally going to be getting married in December, so we had a stock of purple bulbs to use for various decorating items.  Fast forward 2 Decembers (we got engaged in December of 2009) and we still have a LOT of bulbs around.  Decorating a purple tree seemed like the most logical step.

Yep…it’s crooked (turns out, the top of the tree and the bottom of the tree don’t fit together as well as they should) after a lot of “doctoring”, this is as good as this is going to get.  The only tree skirt we had is burgundy, so if we go ahead and do a purple tree every year, I’m going to have to find a different tree skirt.  Oh well, it’s not perfect, but our house feels so festive, I don’t mind

After we got the tree up, I headed to pinterest to see what other crafts I could pursue with the ornaments.  Steve reminded me of a youtube video I showed him last year on how to make a wreath.  After a quick Google, we found the video back (check it out here) and got to work on our own mini craft night.

We had a hanger on hand from dry cleaning, so we pulled that apart and shaped it into a circle.  Then, I headed down to my basement stash for some ornaments.  We hot glued the tops on so they wouldn’t pop off when we moved them around the wreath.

I just took some hot glue and plopped it around the top.  The top is hidden eventually so you don’t have to worry about being neat.

Steve did a lot of the strategic stringing onto the wire.  We found it easiest to bend one end of the hanger and then string 10 or so bulbs and then alternate them to a full pattern.  As we got small pieces done, we would put a piece of painter’s tape on the hanger to hold the pattern we had.  We weren’t too strategic about it, just tried to get a fairly even disbursements.

This was the trickiest part (and yes, we literally used 4 sets of pliers), once we had the bulbs all strung, we had to carefully bend them in to place.  This is important to do sloooowly otherwise, you’ll break some of the ornaments.  Thankfully, we only had 2 fatalities in the process and we twisted the wire back around itself.  As he mentions in the video, there were a lot f weird gaps between the bulbs.  We didn’t have any garland on hand (and didn’t feel like going to Walmart), so we improvised with some leftover tulle from the wedding.

We wound the tulle through the bulbs until we had it tucked in so it looked nice.

Here’s the finished product, we tied some white ribbon and glued some smaller bulbs throughout the wreath to add some dimension.  We have it hanging on our closet door right now, it was too thick to put between our front door and our storm door.  I like it on the inside, it’s just so festive and makes me smile.  I’m so glad Steve remembered the random idea from last year.

If we did it again:
1)   We wouldn’t fill the hanger full to the end, it was pretty heavy and hard to keep perfect shape.
2)   We would have spent even more time forming the circle on the wreath
3)  We would have attached the ribbon hanger before we did the tulle stuffing.  We did it as our last step and it was tricky to make it look integrated into the wreath.

Any other pre-Thanksgiving decorators out there?  Any more ideas for me and my plethora of ornaments?  Do you get ridiculously excited when your husband suggests craft night??

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