Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree

I've had a Starbucks Christmas drink and started my Christmas shopping; as long as Bonfire night has passed that marks the start of Christmas for me.

Let's find us a tree!

We love having a real tree and have gone for an Ikea tree over the last few years because their offer of a voucher to spend in store after Christmas is really good. This year a friend told us about a local tree farm where you can choose your tree from a field and have it cut down fresh. With recently decorating our living room I really wanted to be able to have our tree in there, in the past we've had to put it in the dining room because we just didn't have the space for it. Picking a fresh tree meant I could see the size properly and get something that would definitely fit, plus it was such a lovely crisp morning walking around the fields.

I took along a piece of ribbon measured to the width of my tree space and used it to mark our tree once we found 'the one.'

Up until we decorated the living room, pretty much everything downstairs was red, so all of my Christmas decorations were red too, and any that weren't, were on red ribbons. I picked out some new ornaments and decided to re-used some of my old ones by changing their ribbons.

These glass ornaments were from Wilko for £1.50 each.

I ordered these packs from Morrisons in with my food shop. I was really happy with these apart from the pack of 3 snowballs, they just weren't the best quality when I opened them up, but they were nice enough for the price.

I used some craft wire to make a threader for my ribbons and ordered some white organza ribbon from eBay.

Re-stringing them all was a bit of a grueler, especially when this happened...

Yep! Entire contents of my craft box all over the floor.

I took me a while, but that's Christmas tree OCD for ya! I've always preferred having a variety of ornaments as opposed to a set and I love how it turned out. The fun part will be packing them all away carefully so that the bows hold up for a few years.

My tree lights needed replacing this year because the two matching sets I had were slightly different colours and it drove me crazy. Same lights, same shop, bought at the same time, both warm white - but no, not the same!

I really love the wire lights and wanted to get a set of warm white on silver wire; I ordered some from Matalan, but didn't realise you couldn't use them on a static function, twinkle only. Which would be fine if it was a twinkle rather than an intense rave style flashing. I ended up just using one set of the old warm white lights, the ones that were actually warm, new lights next year for sure! Oh and I didn't manage to find a new tree topper for this year's tree, ah well, got a whole year to find one now.

Stephi xx

#Christmas #ChristmasTree #Decorations #Ornaments #Crafts #RealTree #Starbucks #ChristmasCup