Christmas Around Our House

I've been waiting for a few weeks now to take pictures of some of our Christmas decor. I was super excited to do some of the projects Kara & Tim Paslay presented at our local Holiday Expo, but I needed to print some Instagram photos, and my printer ran out of ink! It's really old and doesn't communicate well with Windows 7, so I decided months ago that whenever it ran out of ink again, I would just buy a new printer.  Anyway... I got a new (wireless!) printer today, and promptly printed some Instagram pictures! Here's how I used them:



I painted the clothespins with craft paint (Ceramcoat Cardinal Red from Hobby Lobby). I absolutely loved painting them. I need to find some more stuff to paint! Anyway, this fun little tree lives on our entry table:





Do you remember the gumball machine? I got it at Goodwill several weeks ago. It has since received a coat of craft paint and been filled with gumballs (obviously). The candy release mechanism doesn't work too well, so it's mostly for show. I have a bucket o' gumballs in the pantry if anyone actually wants one. :)



I was excited to fill up that big glass jar too, which was also one of the ideas I got from Tim & Kara. Inside it is a wooden nativity silhouette made by David's dad. The mulch at the bottom is shredded book pages, which I found at a flea market. I love that someone shredded the pages and bundled them to sell. I don't know if I would have had the courage to shred actual book pages myself. Ha!

Here are some more flea market finds:



I love that little tin with the school house Christmas scene. I actually found two of them in different places on the same day. So, of course, I now have two. :)

On the other side of the school room, are the lockers. I am loving them! They hold SO much stuff -- school stuff, craft stuff, wrapping stuff, paper scrapbook stuff, boiled shrimp, barbeque shrimp... Oh, wait, I went a little "Forrest Gump" there for a second. People had fun with my name after that movie came out... Jen-nay!  Oh, did you see that rabbit? I just chased it.  Anyway... back to the lockers. As we receive Christmas cards in the mail, I'm sticking them up on the locker doors with magnets.



Here's another little tree and some more globes (the big one lights up!). I made the monogram ornaments last year after seeing some similar ones at Pottery Barn. Braden was with me and begged to buy them, but I didn't want to spend nearly $20 on something I thought for sure I could make myself. Mine ended up looking different than the ones at PB, but I like them.



Speaking of ornaments:



We put our tree up with all the "regular" ornaments, and I kept thinking there was something missing. Then I found the box that had all the handmade ornaments the boys have brought home from church and pre-school, and put those on the tree. That's definitely what was missing! My mom came to visit this past weekend, and she brought some of the ornaments from when I was little, so we added those too (that yarn hoop thing is one I made). The tree doesn't look quite right to me without paper angels and Popsicle stick snowflakes.

Last, but not least... I finally added a third wreath to the front door. Hopefully it looks more like a snowman now, and less like the number 8. :)