Christmas Dining Room

The Dining Room is the first room we always decorate for Christmas, because the Dining Room tree is the one on which we hang the small wooden and felt ornaments from the Advent Calendar given to us by my parents when our oldest was quite young.  The box itself is cardboard, but it has held up fairly well over the past 20+ years.

This tree has ornaments that are either home-made or evoke the natural world, in either their nature (apples) or their material (natural fibers, bark, wood, etc).

It has no lights, other than 4 tiny candles (one for each child) that fit in candle holders that clip on the trees.  I'd love to get some small LED candles to put on the tree, but I have yet to find any.  You can see one of the candles in the picture above.

One year I saved egg shell halves, spray painted the white ones gold (kept the blue and green shells from my chickens natural), hot glued some ribbon around the shell half and filled with tiny dried roses from my garden and tiny berries and pinecones from Hobby Lobby.  I gave sets as gifts, but saved a few for myself.

There's an ornament made from old silk ties and rickrack that covers the pinheads where the pins secure the ties to styrofoam ball, and a picture of my oldest when she was 4 yrs old at a "trike-a-thon", holding Abba, her stuffed yellow bear that she kept until she left home.

We even put on the natural wooden baby rattle that my two youngest played with when they were babies.

The paper bird was part of a set of 12 that I made that hung from a mobile for many years, long since dismantled and now the birds hang on the tree, alongside colored and glittered butterflies glued on to sticks that the girls made in years past, and sand dollars picked up on trips to the beach (very rare to find whole ones where we go).

This was a little wooden box with three compartments that some snowflake gift toppers came in, that I covered with paper, some chipboard letters and glitter.

A quilt that my husband's grandmother made probably some time between 1920 and 1950 serves as a tree skirt.  The girls used to love to play with the woodland animals below which only came out at Christmas.

Home-made Christmas cones hang from the chandelier, along with felt elves.  When the girls were young the cones held treats for New Year's Day.  You can glimpse the Christmas Village on the buffet.

Why are there no pictures of the dining room table?  Because it's covered house refinance papers, boxes for lights, miscellaneous garland, some mail, a hat and scarf, and other things that desperately need to be put away or otherwise dealt with.

linking to:

Masterpiece Monday

Show Off Your Cottage Monday