Decorating for Christmas – part 2

Last week I wrote a post about making Christmas decoration, here comes the second part. For me, the Christmas period is mainly about bringing light into the house, as during these weeks in December, daylight is in short supply and decorating with light is good for the soul and lifts the spirit. But why stop with having decorative lights indoors when you can have them outdoors too?

I have an old Christmas garland I no longer use, the electric light that was on it had stopped working and the garland is a bit tatty and frayed. I bought this tall vase and some outdoor battery operated lights and wrapped the lights around the garland.

The vase is meant for battery lights and has this hole in the bottom for the battery compartment to come out of – obviously not a suitable vase for flowers in water – but I soon found out when receiving the battery lights that what they called ‘outdoor’ lights didn’t look very waterproof. I decided to hide the box inside the vase instead, hoping it would be better protected against the unavoidable rain showers.

And here is the garland, half of it tucked into the vase, half draped around the vase.

And in the dark you can better appreciate the lights.

It is decorated with cones and silk flowers....

....and gold apples and ribbons.

The battery lights came as a set of two so my Garrya Elliptica 'James Roof' in the container next to my front door got a set of lights too.

Looking magical in the dark, almost like a little Christmas tree....

....although next to the flowering fuchsias it’s not exactly the right Christmassy look I guess!

So let’s move inside so I can show you my Christmas tree. For many years I didn’t have any as my living room is so small that there is actually no floor space left for a tree. In this little niche I usually have a large vase with dried flowers, they have been parked upstairs in the bedroom for a few weeks and I managed to squeeze in this little tree in its place.

Sadly not a real tree, I haven’t had that since I lived in Norway, the real trees you get here in London starts to drop their needles after a few days so I can’t really see any point in buying one. This little artificial tree is fine for just me.

I have decorated it in gold, I have always wanted a Christmas tree in just golden decoration and decided to do that this year.

So no homemade tree decorations, paper garlands and Norwegian flags as I used to have....

....just the tree, lights and golden decoration.

This post is a scheduled post, I am in hospital again for yet another operation and won’t be able to reply to your comments for a few days. I will be back here as soon as I can, until then, take care.