Holiday Decor | Operation Home

Our Christmas tree(s) are up. Hallelujah! And here’s our main tree…

I know what you’re thinkin’… Why there?? The logical, practical place for a Christmas tree in our house is in the front room, centered on the window. There’s more room up there, plus the tree would be seen from the street, which is nice. The thing is, when it comes to my (ahem, our) Christmas tree, I’m not logical. Not practical. I’m selfish. TOTally selfish. I want that sucker visible for us to admire as much as humanly (treely?) possible. And while we definitely use the front room, we’re not in it as much as the living room. So, after trying a few spots for the best placement, we settled on this. Squeezed between our media cabinet and fireplace. Visible from living room, kitchen and dining nook. It’s the first thing we see when we walk out of our bedroom in the morning. Nice. I can deal with a bit of space crampage if it means a month of sparkly tree enjoyment.

For adornment, we went with a silver, burgundy and deep green theme. Partially sheer, striped silver wire ribbon simply looped down from the top. Strands of silver beads. Colored, round ornaments in various sizes. Plastic, glittery snow flakes and a few randoms to break it all up. Super simple.

We have a nice tree skirt, but it didn’t mesh well with our dark floors (it’s a dark olive color that looked great with the floors in our last house, but here, not so much). So, I used an old white curtain and draped a faux sheepskin over top instead. FYI, the Santa dances. And is awesome.

We need a tree topper, so I’ll have to think something up for that. We’ve gone without one for years now because I was ~~lazy~~ uninspired. I’m more motivated this year, so we’ll see what comes out of my crazy brain.

Our other tree is our Charlie Brown Tree….

Ignore the cord… it’s been too icy over here in TEXAS (right???) for me to drive to the store to get a suitable, hideable extension cord which will allow for cord camouflage. But it will happen. Anyways, doesn’t this teeny tree remind you of the spindly, little tree from A Charlie Brown Christmas??? It even has two (yes, two) blinking lights (the rest are constant), which remind me of the random enlarging/spinning stars in the sky at the end of the show when Charlie’s trying to save the tree. We originally wanted to decorate it using some wooden ornaments (made by Joey’s dad) along with some other homemade gems. So, it started out looking like this….

…Meh. The basket was a bit blah, and the ornaments were too big and too few. I decided to paint the bottom of the basket to make it pop. I used simple black craft paint that I’ve had for a hundred years (I’m totally channeling Dane Cook here… “I got home from work today and took, like, a Hundred Hour Nap… NO YOU DID NOT..You’d be very sick if you were taking hundred hour naps. That’s a coma, say you took a coma after work and I can follow the story!”). So, anyhoo, this paint is ancient. But it worked….

I simply chose a row on the basket roughly halfway up to use as my stopping point and free-handed the top row with a small craft brush. Then, I filled in the basket below with paint (sorry, no pics). In the end, it looked like this (It’s still partially wet in this pic)….

I hung three stockings that my mom embroidered for us below it.

I tried them on the fireplace first, but they were GINORMOUS. Our fireplace looked like it belonged in the Keebler Elf House while they were up there. I couldn’t bear not displaying them, though, so I decided that our little hallway alcove was as good a spot as any and went for it. I used a few 3M utensil hooks to hang them. Easy peasy.

I decided to use the ornaments atop the stockings, instead of on the tree. I definitely prefer the tree bare to decorated now that I see it. For sure. Then, I added a few burlap bows to hide the hooks (which might not stay… I’m not usually a bow person, so we’ll see if they survive the holiday season. They’re annoying me in these pics. But are strangely charming in person. So, it’s a toss up.).

So, those our our trees this year. What kind of trees do y’all have this year?

…this is a daily conversation in our house. Lucas dislikes nicknames and for whatever reason my first instinct is to call him “Pumpkin”. Not sure why. It just comes out. And he corrects me with his given name every time. I just love that kid. Anyways, speaking of pumpkins, we bought a few this weekend at a local pumpkin patch.

As we were leaving, Lucas swooped in like a superhero, grabbed the cart from me and stated “I’ll take care of that!”…

Such a little man. 🙂

When it came to decorating the pumpkins, we decided not to carve them this year since they go rotten so fast (at least ours always have) and the thought of Lucas wielding paints almost caused my brain to short out. Upon inspecting my craft box, I came across a jar of Mod Podge that had been long since neglected. Perfect! I raided our stash of tissue paper and came up with red, orange, green and pink. Pink made the cut because of Lucas. Occasionally, we’ll be sitting in silence and he’ll randomly state “I like pink.” You can tell he’d been thinking quite intensely about it. And it cracks me up every time.

I decided that we needed some bat silhouettes for a Halloweeny vibe, so I folded the tissue paper into small squares, then folded that in half. I googled “bat sillohuette” and chose a pic I liked, then I sketched half of the bat on the paper right along the fold. Like, so….

I cut it out with scissors, unfolded it and behold! I was left with many symmetrical bats.

I did larger bats in green and smaller ones in red. Then, I cut out circles and triangles with the other colors.

I set up our supplies…..

Then, we got to work. We used foam brushes to smear the Mod Podge on the pumpkin,

We placed on our tissue paper and patted it down gently to be sure it adhered,

Then, we added another coat of Mod Podge on top of the tissue paper. It worked better when we waited a few minutes before Mod Podging the second coat. If the paper became too saturated while it was still mobile on the pumpkin, it tore more easily.

A few action shots…

We just decorated our pumpkins randomly. Whatever floated our boats. I’ve always liked homemade-looking pumpkins. I can see the fun that was had decorating them and that makes me smile.

As for Lucas, he LOVED this project. It kept him occupied for much longer than we’d expected. He painted on the Mod Podge easily and did a great job adding paper. In fact, he loved it so much that when his pumpkin was done to his satisfaction, he started working on the back of Joeys. And he was quite the brush hog. Who knew??! I really need to do projects like this with him more often. I did have to go back and Mod Podge over his tissue paper once he was done since he didn’t seem to have patience for that part, but all-in-all it was a two-year-old success! And I’m hoping that maybe the Mod Podge will help preserve our pumpkins so they last a little longer.

Here’s the finished product…

And the rest of the porch…

I have to say I’m proud of myself for decorating the porch. BEFORE the first fall holiday. I still want to make a wreath for the front door, but at least there are signs of life now. Our porch says “Hey, hot stuff. People LIVE here.” Not that Mat didn’t. It’s just more obvious now. Flowers, a few pumpkins, and (gasp!) I cleaned the chair. Did you know it’s actually black? I’d almost forgotten. These simple additions are definitely not ground-breaking, but a happy improvement from this for sure…

So, next we’ll hopefully be replacing our light fixture (spoiler alert: we bought it about a month ago. It’s been holding down the fort in the garage ever since.) I’ve also been casually looking for a second rocking chair and have been trying to narrow down a paint color for them. At this point, it’s anybody’s guess.

So, does anyone have any other toddler-friendly pumpkin-decorating ideas they want to share?