Christmas Tree Craft

Do you have your Christmas Tree up yet? Some people (like my husband and his family) put their trees up the day after Thanksgiving. Some other people (like me and my family) put their trees up kind of as an afterthought and whenever they feel like dragging all the decorations out. It’s been interesting for my husband and I to meld our two worlds and completely different ways of doing things together – but it’s been fun!

We decided to go ahead and put up our tree the day after Thanksgiving. But that’s about all we did… While we do have some other super cute decorations gracing our counter top, our tree….it’s about as bare as bare can be. Now, don’t misunderstand – we attempted putting decorations on it, but our dear sweet 2 year old thought they looked better in her hands…and on the floor…and mixed in with her toys… So back in their boxes they went and I now stare at our 6 foot white Christmas tree with nothing on it but a big red bow at the top and 1 ornament directly under it (apparently we missed that one…). And we have no lights on it because….well, I’m just too lazy and get waaaay too frustrated when putting them on. (The hubby and I have already agreed that our next tree will be prelit.)

While it may look a little silly to some, I actually enjoy the simplicity of our tree as it is. But even still, we plan on doing something more with it eventually. I actually found an idea online that makes your Christmas tree look like a snowman! How cute would that be?! And since our tree is already white, I figured this was something we just had to do! But alas, doing so requires us to make a paper mache snowman head…which requires a stash of newspapers and such…which we just so happened to throw out recently… So we are in the process of collecting more. Hopefully we will have enough soon and I can post about how that whole ordeal turns out. In the meantime, I’ll tell you about our other ‘Christmas tree.’

Because we are expecting to move sometime in the next few months, we originally decided against putting any of our Christmas decorations up. We figured it wasn’t worth the hassle of putting up, just to have to pack them all up for our move…along with everything else in our house. But my oh-so-wise husband shared with me how he thought we should bite the bullet and go ahead and decorate for our daughter. She’s at the age now where all the decorations excite and mesmerize her. I knew he was right, which is why we now have a naked tree in our living room.

But before we decided to decorate, I was spending a lot of time trying to figure out alternative ideas (i.e. crafts that would keep the little one busy but also double as festive decorations). It wasn’t long before I found this Christmas tree alternative online. I remember thinking that it looked so beautifully simple and that I had to make it. The original one was made with coffee filters, I believe. I, however, have a Keurig and do not own coffee filters. And I couldn’t see the point in buying a box of filters, just to use a few for a tree that would only be hanging on our wall for a month. But Styrofoam plates I did have!

Originally, I simply planned on trying to recreate what I saw in the picture, but my husband has never been big on all white and said he thought we should paint our plates green. (You may be wondering why in the world we have a white Christmas tree if my husband doesn’t like it. The answer is simple: He knows that I like white trees….and it was majorly on sale at the time…haha) So we took his painted plates idea and just ran with it. We got a good two days worth of fun with the little one out of it!