Our (current) home for the holidays

Currently, we're living in a townhouse that my in-laws own. Renting in a college town typically means that you are stuck in a 1 year lease, and we wanted flexibility in case we find a home that we want to buy during that time. It's enough space for our current needs, but it isn't all that big, so we decided to forgo the Christmas tree this year. I've found other ways (courtesy of Pinterest) to Christmas-up the place and I've found that we're not even really missing the tree.

I gathered up a bunch of discarded fir limbs at a local Christmas tree sale lot and arranged them in my urns with silver spray-painted pinecones, faux holly berries, and some twigs from Hobby Lobby. I tied glittery bows from Big Lots to the bottoms of the urns for a nice touch.

For the wreathy thing, I just laid out several branches on top of each other and covered up the ends of the branches with more branches facing the other direction. In the middle, I tied all of the branches together using jute string. Then I banded three silver glittery ornaments together and tied those to the branches. I stuck some faux holly in and added and red bow and I was done. What do you think?

For our living room, I purchased two $10 decorated garlands from Big Lots, strung my own lights on them, and placed them on top of the bookcases. I made a cute garland from an idea I saw on Pinterest. See below for details.

I purchased 14 gold-ish ornaments from Mike's Merchandise for a total of $4, 2 packs of glittery sticker letters from Hobby Lobby ($3 per pack but I used a 40% coupon), and two small rolls of red shimmery fabric ribbon from Hobby Lobby ($2 each). I threaded the ribbon through the ornaments, hung the garland up with sewing pins, and then stuck on the letters. It was so easy and I'm very pleased with the outcome!

Because we have no tree, I decorated my pussy willow branches in small silver ornaments. The glass Hurricane container holds peppermints and candy canes. I might consider tying a lovely red bow around the glass to add a little more color.

This year we did an E-card because we procrastinated and didn't get Christmas cards out in the mail in time. Oops! I'll make sure to get a head start next year. This is a photo of us taken in May '11 in Kauai, Hawaii.