Ornaments don’t have to be just for trees!

I have a lot of ornaments. Over the years, I’ve come up with some ideas for ways to display them. A tree is the obvious choice, but I’m maxed out on trees! I’ve got our main tree in the living room which holds all of my special ornaments. The family room is the kids’ tree – each has their own ornament collection. The kitchen has a skinny tree with my food and cooking ornaments. And my office has a skinny tree with my book ornaments. No more room for trees at my house, so I’ve had to come up with some other ways to use my ornaments.

When we got married, we bought boxes of pink ball ornaments in different sizes to fill in the tree. I now have so many ornaments I don’t have space for those. I keep those in a basket in the living room, in front of the fireplace. I spray painted a basket gold and tied some pink ribbon and artificial flowers on it to dress it up. I also have a few pink and white ornaments I like to display in a small footed bowl in my dining room.

When my grandmother passed away, I inherited a lot of her ornaments. Her tree was blue, so her ornaments don’t match the color scheme of my main tree or living room, but blue works well in my family room, so I’ve got some displayed in a bowl on a table there. This year I also put some in a lidded glass dish that was hers (I managed to break one in the process of trying to get it full but get the lid to fit!). She also had some old pink ornaments that I’ve placed in a hurricane vase.

I like to hang ornaments in windows, so I’ve got blue star ornaments above the kitchen sink and 12 Days of Christmas ornaments in the eating area windows.

We added some garland to the light fixture above the kitchen table and hung some ornaments there as well.

This year we also created some chair decorations for the kitchen and used some ornaments there.

Ornaments can also be added to wreaths, garland, candle rings, stockings, or just strewn down the middle of a table.

Ornaments don’t have to be just for trees! I have a lot of ornaments. Over the years, I’ve come up with some ideas for ways to display them. A tree is the obvious choice, but I’m maxed out on trees! I’ve got our main tree in the living room which holds all of my special … Read more →

We always put our holiday decorations up the weekend after Thanksgiving. I was really looking forward to it this since I have been slowly replacing old ugly decorations with new ones I like, so I finally feel as though it’s looking nice around here.

Of course I was overly optimistic. We put up the tree in the living room and about 40% of it wouldn’t light. This is the second artificial tree we’ve owned for that room in 12 years. They really should last longer than this. When we moved to this house in 2000, we decided to switch from a real tree to an artificial. I remember buying the pre-lit artificial tree at Kmart for a great price (I think it was $100 or something). That lasted 2 years. We replaced it with another tree that cost a lot more from Michael’s. That one has lasted about 10 years. I had a premonition about this – for weeks before Christmas I had a feeling there was going to be a problem, and I was right. Yes, we could just string lights on it on top of the ones that don’t work, but we already add a long string of pink lights to that tree and I don’t want any more wires. So off we went to the stores. Ugh.

It seems that they’ve changed the shape of trees since we bought last. First of all, we could not

find the height we needed – 6.5 feet. We ended up with a 7.5 foot tree from Lowe’s for much more than I wanted to spend. The tree is taller than what we had, but narrower and instead of being a triangle shape it kind of flares out at the bottom, is straight in the middle, then flares in at the top. Different, but I don’t mind it. Since our ceilings are 7.5 feet high, we couldn’t put the wooden box my husband built years ago under the tree (I like some space between branches and floor for presents).

We also had a crisis with our tree topper. We bought this topper on Valentine’s weekend the first year we were married when we were on a getaway to Corning, NY (for our first Christmas, we used a big bow that was on a wedding gift). The tree topper MUST go on the tree, but it wouldn’t fit! Terry ended up snipping off the top little branches and cleaning off the top of the center pipe to get it to fit on top. It fits, but the only way to get it on and off is to tip the entire tree sideways!

I think the tree looks nice and every year I love hanging the ornaments and remembering where I bought them or who gave them to me. I think I need to take photos of them and label them so my kids will know the meaning behind each on, but that is a giant task. I have ornaments from both grandmothers and I buy ornaments on our trips (I have ornaments from Italy, Scotland, Maine, Hawaii, Bahamas, Arizona, California gold country, Saint Saveur Quebec, Florida, and Ocean City, Maryland among other places).. My mother-in-law bought us the first Christmas and baby’s first year ornaments. My mother has bought me a lot of ornaments and started my collection when I was a teenager. There’s an ornament that reminds me of our first dog (there used to be two of this ornament, but she ate the other one, so I always think of the remaining one as her ornament). There is the bird’s nest with 2 big birds and a baby bird that Terry bought for me the year I was pregnant with our first child.  There is even an ornament that one of Terry’s past bosses bought him – the man was a kind of mentor to him, so I always think of him when I hang it.

In the coming days I’ll share some of my new decorations with you and show you some of my Christmas collections that have expanded nicely.

Do you have ornaments that are meaningful to you? How long do your pre-lit artificial trees last?

We always put our holiday decorations up the weekend after Thanksgiving. I was really looking forward to it this since I have been slowly replacing old ugly decorations with new ones I like, so I finally feel as though it’s looking nice around here. Of course I was overly optimistic. We put up the tree … Read more →

At this point, dear reader, you must be scratching your head and thinking “What else could she have inherited from her grandmother? Her house must be full!” But, as I’ve been doing since my grandmother passed away in May, I continue to find ways to use, display, and enjoy her belongings with some inspiration from Martha.

It should be no surprise that now I’m working through the Christmas items I got from her. My grandmother’s Christmas tree was always filled with blue ornaments – blue was her signature color. My own tree is pink (which is my signature color!), so her ornaments don’t work on my tree. I do have a lot of blue in my house, so I gathered all of the blue ornaments I received and put them in a Heise glass bowl she gave to me. It’s on the coffee table in the family room and looks very pretty.

Among her things we also found some pink ornaments – mostly hot pink, which doesn’t quite go with my tree. So I took these and put them in a glass container to display. They look great in my dining room.

Since everything on her tree was blue, she had a few interesting items you wouldn’t normally find in blue. The most memorable for my kids and me were her blue Santas. She had two blue Santa ornaments she bought in Japan. Every Christmas we would talk about these with her. She was so proud of them. “You never see a blue Santa!” she would say. Since there were two, each of my children got one (and fortunately they are identical so there was no squabbling). The Santas are hanging on the kids’ tree in the family room. They’re a bit old and falling apart (after all, she went to Japan probably 40 years ago)

She also had some elves, very 1960s elves, which are of course blue. I tried to put these in my kitchen, but the green color clashed with the sea green of my tile, so instead I gave them to the kids and they hung them on their tree.

At this point, dear reader, you must be scratching your head and thinking “What else could she have inherited from her grandmother? Her house must be full!” But, as I’ve been doing since my grandmother passed away in May, I continue to find ways to use, display, and enjoy her belongings with some inspiration from … Read more →