Gift & Tree Decorating Ideas

Wow, it’s been a busy week already. How about you? Are you getting all ready? Have you finished decorating & shopping?

We decided this year to do the twelve days of Christmas with Reed to spread out the gifts so it’s not so overwhelming getting them all on Christmas morning. He is almost 2 1/2 so I think he will get excited about opening a little gift each day. I don’t know how many years we will do this as the presents get more expensive as they get older…LOL! I started scouting out books, games and toys a few months ago as I saw them at Home Goods & TJ Maxx. They have different stuff than you find in the typical toy department and for really great prices.

In one of the Holiday paper pads, there was a sheet with numbers on them. They would be cute for an advent calendar too since it was 1-25. Obviously, we just used the 1-12 for what we needed them for. It will be fun to have him search for the number of the day we are on. Wednesday, December 14th starts day 1.

 

I promised Jeff last year as we were wrapping presents that I wouldn’t buy any more NEW wrapping paper until we finished what we had. See, every year I would choose a “theme” in which to wrap gifts so we had collected quite a mish mash of what hadn’t been used over the years. So, I fully intended on using the paper, ribbon, bows, gift tags we had until….

I saw the ribbons at Michaels this year. Have you seen them? So stinkin cute, I was giddy picking them out. I bought so many when they were half off. Most of them were .99! Even if I had too many, I knew they would get used for other things. I think the white pom pom might be my favorite!!!

I put all the “12 Days” in the buckets so he doesn’t have to dig under the tree, plus I was looking for an excuse to use the buckets for presents. I am loving that look that I have seen in PB catalog & Pinterest this year. I added some sparkly ribbon and greens to dress the plain white metal tubs I have for summer parties. Had I bought them for filling with presents, I would of gone more aged...but it’s what I had on hand and I am not sure if I want to part with my “summer” tubs.

Here’s another way I decorated the packages with the “gift tag”. I cut out the receiver’s initial (and wrote the from on the back) from Holiday paper (I am glad I am getting good use out of those scapbook paper pads, LOL).

Ever since I had to figure out how to photograph a tree in manual mode to capture the lights, I can’t stop playing with the different settings. Wow, natural light really is a photographer’s best friend. Centsational Girl had some great photo tips last week and natural light was one of them. To illustrate the point…

Here is our family tree during the day-

 

vs at night-

Bear with me as I play with my camera, just thought this was a pretty shot…although it’s at night.

Even the “old girl” in our living room looks good during the day! Poor thing has lights out everywhere…

I added a couple things to this tree because it was soooo lacking and it’s right when you enter our front door, so the poor girl had to try to be pretty. First I just had the red & gold beads already and it looked better with…but then I found some feathery, glittery yarn (Martha Stewart) in a gold/champagne color and knew I could quadruple the strands up and wrap them around one another to make a thicker soft garland. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this stuff. I want to use it everywhere And I may have, well not everywhere…LOL! Do you ever get like that? 

I don’t think this picture does it justice. It’s just so soft & pretty sparkling from the tree lights.

Home should be the safest place on earth…

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