We might be a few months into our second year of marriage, but this year we got our very first Christmas tree!  Our new home needs a tree.  Clearly I had my priorities in the right order since the first order of business was to go purchase ornaments.  A couple years ago when we were registering for our wedding at Crate & Barrel I had seen a lot of cute ornaments.  Our first and only stop for ornaments was at Crate & Barrel.  Luckily for us there was a 30% off sale on all the ornaments!!  My husband and I filled up our basket with lots and lots of white, silver and red ornaments.  I was pretty sure we were buying too many, but figured we would return the ones we didn’t need.

It seemed like destiny as we drove up Massachusetts Avenue and right by a Christmas tree sale at the local church.  Instead of heading the Whole Foods or Home Depot to buy our tree we were going to get it from the church!!  They had a ton of options.  I am not really sure why we didn’t think of checking out the local churches in the first place.   At least we will remember this for next year!

After walking around the available “medium” size tree options a few times we quickly agreed on this guy:

Sorry for the crappy camera phone pictures.  It didn’t dawn on me to bring my camera … fail!  Anyways, after purchasing the tree we laughed a little at our lack of planning on how we were going to get the tree home.  It might have been December, but the convertible top when down and the tree when in the backseat of the car.  We made it home just before the rain started in.  Pretty good timing if I do say so myself.

We were home and had a tree and ornaments, but we were lacking lights and maybe more importantly a tree stand.  We threw the tree in a bucket and walked to CVS.  There we purchased a tree stand and 200 white lights.  Back to the house we went to decorate our tree!!

After a number of tries we finally go the tree straight in the tree stand.  The husband cranked the Christmas music and we spent the next hour or so arranging the ornaments perfectly.  Here’s a close up of a couple of the ornaments.

I am very happy with our final product.  Check it out …

What do you think??  I’m very pleased.  Our menorah and dradle looked great next to the tree throughout Hanukkah! Maybe next year we will buy a tree skirt and actually get some gifts under the tree :)  We did have a present under the tree for less than 24 hours.  Then I couldn’t wait any longer and gave my husband his holiday present prior to Christmas Eve.

Happy Holidays!

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Centerpieces and/or flower arrangements can be quite costly this time of year.  With Thanksgiving over and Christmas right around the corner it seemed like the perfect time to share the DIY rose and cranberry center pieces we make every Thanksgiving.  My mom got the idea when walking through the flower section in Whole Foods a few years ago.  My mother use to be in charge of making the arrangements, but then my sister took over.  Check out our pretty Thanksgiving table will all the yummy food!!

My sister was kind enough to let me document the process of the center piece creation this year.  So here we go!

What you need:

  • ~27 Yellow Roses
  • 6 bags of whole cranberries
  • 3 square vases
  • water

Place the cranberries in the square vases and add water (but not all the way to the top).

Remove the leaves from the rose stems and hold it up to the vase to determine how much stem to cut off.  Cut off the stem.

Push the rose into the vase between the cranberries.  Then rinse and repeat!!  Each vase will hold about 9 roses depending on the size of the vase.

After you’ve put in all the roses add additional cranberries and water as needed so they are almost to the very top of the vase.  In this end this is what you get.

As you can see we miss counted the yellow roses this year and had to through in a few red ones. I think it still looks pretty cute!

Happy Holidays and DIY!

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