Two Holiday Vignettes

(Yawn)

I was up until 2:00 last night, putting up the Christmas Tree.

Two. o'clock. in. the. morning.
(Yawn)

By myself.  Oh, joy.

Mr. Tallgrass doesn't get too excited about Christmas decorating.  His obligation to help ends with hauling the Christmas tree box out of the basement.  It's huge.  Any additional help is purely optional.  I started decorating yesterday afternoon and he came home from work with a pounding headache.  Rest assured, I told him, YOU DON'T HAVE TO HELP.

And he didn't.  He went to bed.  Poor baby.

Anyhoo, I wanted to have my vignettes ready for today's Southern Hospitality Linky Party.  Here we go!

Vignette Number One: Fireplace Nativity Scene

We don't use the fireplace in the living room.  It's woodburning and the chimney sweep stood us up last year.  We just haven't taken the time to schedule with another one.  But how dull to have a big black hole in the living room!

The nativity scene is an aged metal silhouette from Hobby Lobby that I picked up for half price.  I shoved the wood that we keep in the fireplace for decoration to the rear of the box as a backdrop and looped evergreen garland around the interior of the fireplace.  I had a length of garland remaining, so I ran it along the hearth so I could weave lights into it.  The cord slips in neatly under the glass doors of the fireplace so I could run them around the nativity.  Finally, I tucked a couple of floral picks on each side of the scene for a little extra sparkle.

Vignette Number Two: Tabletop Display

I picked up this tray at Savers (my favorite thrift store) a couple of weeks ago.  It's big.  It was only  $3.99.

I'm sure someone out there is going to gasp when I say that I REPAINTED IT.

Sing it with me, people:  "I see a cheesy lighthouse scene and I want to paint it black."

Actually, I liked the running dash of white along the edge.  So I kept it.  Everything else I painted over with glossy acrylic craft paint.  It was faster and it's getting to be too cold to spray paint outside.  Love how it turned out!

I tucked battery operated LED lights around the evergreen picks.  The jury is still out on them.  They are a little too blue for my liking.  But it is nice to have a little light on the coffee table.

One tree has Spanish moss in the bottom and is filled with two red sparkly picks from Hobby Lobby.

The small tree is filled with floral filler.  Basically, they are tiny red styrofoam balls.  Stupid little things have a mind of their own, probably thanks to static.  I cut the larger green balls from a floral pick.

The other large tree is filled with a string of gold bead garland.  Want to know a secret?  One strand didn't quite fill the container, so I stuck an old acrylic craft paint in the middle of it and ran the garland around it.  Can't tell, can you?

The glass trees were handed down to me. I remember when I was a little girl, my grandmother filled them with colorful foil wrapped chocolate balls. Oooo, I wanted one of those candies! My grandmother would scold me when I tried to open the glass trees since she filled them very carefully to the top. Then, I realized that rather than buy new candies every year for these trees, she just stuck them in the freezer after Christmas. Good grief, who knows how old those chocolates were! You can see that being thrifty runs in the family.