Decking the halls

We put our Christmas tree up this week, how late are we?? I know everyone has already done the whole 'look at our tree' thing but here is ours. Apologies for the rubbish photos but the camera doesn't do low light very well and I didn't want to put the flash on so you could see the lights...I am really not a photographer!

I don't have a tree skirt or anything to cover the base as I will soon be putting presents under there to cover it.

It isn't stylish or modern or different. It doesn't have a colour scheme other than 'christmassy' colours like red, gold and silver. Basically it looks like Christmas threw up on our tree. I love it.

I love the family traditions of Christmas and I like quite a traditional looking tree (i.e. traditional to us like the trees we had as kids used to look) we have quite a mish mash of decorations that we have collected along the way and I make it my mission to use all of the decorations.

I like these wooden figurine ones, they were from paperchase a few years back and I had some similar as a child.

The rest are all baubles and tinsel bought from either supermarkets or DIY stores in packs.

We bought this owl one from the Christmas market the other week as we have a random private joke about a bit from Phone Shop where they say 'A Owl? A owl bruv'.

I don't really do too much other than the tree as we live in a smallish flat so I don't want to crowd it but I did throw some tinsel over the picture frames and put up my usual few sentimental ornaments and little touches.

We don't have a fireplace so don't have stockings (we have only had fireplaces in half the places we have lived) and I don't have a mantel to dress. The only other place so far to get decorated is the table, I couldn't find anywhere to hang the wreath so I used it on the table. The snowman and santa salt and pepper shakers are from Avon years back when we had family round for Christmas dinner the first  (and so far only) time at our last house.

Now I'm off to have a massive present wrapping session while listening to carols and maybe having a cheeky glass of wine!

That's probably about it from me here before Christmas, working Monday and Tuesday and then looking forward to some family time. I hope you all have a lovely Christmas however you are spending it xx

Not the look I was going for...

I posted my first post on my wedding blog today on how we chose what venues to go and look around, you can click here to get to it or there's a link to the blog at the top of the toolbar on the right...

When I changed the office into a 'dining room' a while back in this post I had hoped we would use the table to eat at, which we did for a few weeks but then it started to accumulate stuff on it.

Oh dear. I think because it's near the front door we started putting stuff down on it as we came in, and as it was always covered with stuff we stopped eating at it.

I find the best way to stop a space accumulating stuff is to make it into a space with a purpose, if it's just a blank space that you don't regularly use or isn't attractive it will get used as a dumping ground.

I still had my table runner from our old dining table at our last house and wanted to add some nice table decorations and a centrepiece to make it into more of a 'proper' dining space.

I started by clearing everything off, then just played around with a few different configurations.

 I thought the 3 canvasses were a bit much, so landed on this set up as the one for now

 The candles are from all around the house, mainly the living room, bathroom and hallway

This hurricane lamp was just on the floor in the bathroom as it didn't have a home but it looks much better on the table

 The star votives and canvas were on the bookshelves in the hallway

Much better! Hopefully it'll discourage us from dumping stuff here and keep it clear to eat at.