Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Christmas Frugality

There are a lot of reasons for cutting back on Christmas spending, and not all of them are financial. If you're like me and think that the seasonal frenzy for buying piles and piles of new things is getting way out of hand, spiritually if not necessarily economically, perhaps you'll join us in a "Buy-Less" Christmas this year. "Buy-Less" can mean either buy fewer new things (so that thrift shops, white elephant exchanges and other "recycling" dodges are okay), or, if you want to really challenge yourself, you can make it literally "buyless," not spending any money at all on Christmas things and making merry only with what you already have on hand.

We are, I'm somewhat ashamed to say, well ahead of the Christmas game when it comes to that "already have on hand" bit. So having to make do with that storage closet full of Christmas crap we've accumulated over 26 years really won't be much of a hardship. And since I hate to shop, especially in Christmas crowds, I have little problem staying out of stores where I'd be tempted to pile up the shiny bags. Keeping my mitts off the mountains of CATALOGS that come whooshing into the house every day is another matter entirely.

In the spirit of the concept, I whisked through some of the magazine pages I've scanned for posterity and came up with these three ideas for recycled Christmas decorations. I don't know which magazine (or catalog) they came from originally. I admit they're a bit banal, but they're only here as inspiration anyway.

This one is just a store-bought wire vine trellis set up to showcase Christmas cards and ornaments. My thought was that even if you didn't have the trellis itself, you might be able reshape wire hangers to do something similar. A bit of leftover garden lattice might work the same way.


This one is a Christmas tree decorated with chandelier crystals. Now, it's true that most people don't have spare crystals just lying around the house, but it illustrates the idea that you can re-purpose things like old costume jewelry and strings of second-hand beads to decorate a small tree. You can sometimes get insanely fun costume jewelry full of rhinestones, "gold" brass and colored paste gems at thrift stores. I like the bucket-style tree stand here, too. It lifts the tree from the surface of the table so you can put buffet dishes (or presents) under it. You could achieve a similar effect with an ordinary bucket and some aluminum foil or a scrap of embossed wallpaper. Be sure it's heavy enough to keep the tree from toppling over.

We are getting so we like having a smaller tabletop tree in preference to the ridiculously huge evergreens we used to haul into the house (and out again, dropping debris like Pigpen every every inch of the way). In order to get a tree to look right under our high ceilings we always had to get a tall and therefore wide monster that cut down on floor space in the living room, right when we needed it for more people to mill around in.

Although an enormous tree was practically required by law when we had younger kids and Santa came on Christmas Eve to pile the gifts up hip-deep around it, in these latter days, a well-dressed tree -- artificial, no less! -- on the sideboard in the dining room window nook is enough. As a bonus, the family presents that gradually appear around it in the leadup to Christmas Day don't look as lonely and dwarfed (and kind of silly) as they used to.


These (below) are candlesticks made out of staircase balusters, 2 of them, each cut into 2 different length pieces, with short candle spikes made from double-ended screws. I'm not a fan of distressed or crackled paint finishes, so I'd dress them up differently, with gold spray paint or something else more elegant if I was making them. But some people enjoy the old-fashioned look because it seems more Warm and Genuine and Homey (even if you have to purposely mess something up to make it look authentically old).

You can do any damn thing you please with the raw materials of this idea. Glue some of that thrift store jewelry's loose gems to your pieces of wood. Squeeze aluminum foil around them. And again, you don't actually have to have spare unfinished wood turnings around the house. You could use a couple of ancient chair legs or even a couple of plain waste blocks of 2X2 lumber (or 4X4 for pedestal candles) in a similar way.

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