Decorating for Christmas!

Putting up our new tree!

Spreading the branches

Sorry it's been so long since my last post! Things have gotten crazy with Christmas. So it's definitely strange that Christmas Eve is the day I have time! But I do have a little bit of catching up to do. So the weekends before and after Thanksgiving were spent buying a tree, making ornaments (cause we're so poor), putting up and decorating the tree, and decorating the house. We had a blast decorating for our first Christmas together, even though we would only be able to enjoy the decorations for a couple of weeks since we left for Utah on the 15th. But we enjoyed them while we were there.
So we bought a cheap $20 dollar tree and a couple of boxes of cheap lights and one box of ball ornaments for a dollar, and some tinsel and beads for a dollar, but I knew we didn't have money to buy tons of nice ornaments, so I decided to make some myself. I had popsicle sticks that I had bought during my student teaching days, and I had crayons and paper, so I figured I could make some myself. All I needed was some glitter and Elmer's glue. I looked up some patterns on the internet, and these are what I made!

North Pole Sign

Snowflake

Snowman

Sleigh

Paper ornament

However, it took much longer than I thought to color the popsicle sticks, so if anyone decides to make these themselves, I would suggest using paint. That would have been much faster. Most of the ideas came from Squidoo.

Finished product

My Italian Nativity. Yes, 2 of the heads are gone, they broke on the plane ride from Italy:( Someday I'll have them fixed

Closer up of Jesus and Mary