Homemade Christmas Ideas

by TheFrogPrince&Family

Christmastime in many households is clutter-time. Boxes and boxes of decorations come out, and then, when you’re done with the tree, more boxes and boxes come out, and then when you’re done with the windows…etc... By the time you’re out of boxes, you’re also out of usable surface area. Give it a little more time, though, and all of the Christmas cards you receive will be propped in all the narrow spaces taking up all the space on your coffee tables, mantles, etc. It gets so that there is so much out to look at, you can’t actually see anything. It was trends like this which made me start trying to come up with homemade Christmas ideas that leave you with, if not somewhere you can put down a mug of cocoa without knocking five other things over, at least some visual breathing room.

What I like to do is create card-hanging garlands. With only a small nail at each end, these can be easily strung across open doorways or room divisions, or, if you tend to receive a great lot of cards, even along the crown molding of an entire wall. The idea is simple – have a pretty garland, space small, painted laundry pins, or similar, along it (you can buy these at craft stores), and end up with an attractive, reusable method of displaying your cards that does not damage the cards the way that taping them will, has minimal impact on your walls, and both clearly displays the cards AND keeps them OUT OF THE WAY. The effect can also help balance out the visual display of a decorated room, via framing the overall space by bringing some of the decorations from the lower visual area of the room (such as coffee tables) up to, well, the top of the room.

Depending on how the room is decorated, I’ll use different kinds of garland. At the fanciest, I’ve used the evergreen garland that’s pre-lit with white lights, wrapped it loosely with burgundy velvet craft ribbon, and had a cluster of miniature pine cones backed with a spray of gold “holiday picks” glued onto the front of each of the laundry pins spaced along it to hold cards. Fake poinsettia flowers would mask where the garland was fixed to the small nails at either end. I hope you enjoy this homemade Christmas idea.