Decorating the Tree, Step by Step

I'd like to share a description of how I went about decorating the Christmas tree in our foyer.

Welcome to Our New Home

Welcome to our new home!  We moved this summer, from Maryland to North Carolina.  Our new home is a bit smaller than our last one, as we now have no kids living at home full time anymore.  This Christmas season, I've had the fun task of figuring out how to decorate the new home for the holidays using all my old stuff.  We certainly have enough decorations to completely deck the halls here, with only minimal new purchases.

I know it's been a while since I've entered anything new into this blog, and I guess I don't really know where it will go from here, but for the moment, I'm excited to share some things in this space. Hope those of you who happen to find me here enjoy your stay!

For this first post, I'd like to share some photos of the front of the house and our foyer.

One Last Look at Winter

Last week, we had a couple of days of heavy rain, and one of those days also brought heavy winds in our area.  Unfortunately, this meant that one of our Leyland Cypress trees in our backyard blew over, uprooted from the saturated ground at the roots.  It is a sad loss for us, because the tree was one in a row of trees that we planted 8 years ago as a natural screen to provide some privacy in our back yard.  Now we have a gap in that tree screen, and it will now look uneven and irregular even if we replace it with a large specimen.

So as we cut up the fallen tree to get it out of the yard and adjoining driveway, I took the opportunity to use the natural greens in an indoor impromptu arrangement in our foyer.  There was no art involved, I just cut up a bunch of branches and put them in an urn.  Matched up with a wintry pinecone wreath and some birch-bark candles, it makes a simple vignette on our foyer table.

I know spring is on its way, and I'm really looking forward to it!  But this is a simple and easy way to give winter one last hurrah in our home.