Nashville Wife

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tree stump ornament

Our Christmas Tree

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Nashville Wife Christmas Tree

This year, we purchased our seven-foot Christmas tree from the very fancy tree lot at The Home Depot. At the end of the holiday season last year, a kind, elderly lady who was moving out of her home and into an assisted living facility gave me a bunch of beautiful, silver and gold balls. Combined with our silver star, white lights, and other ornaments, the balls are a great addition!

Still, my favorite decoration is the tree stump ornament that I made from our first Christmas tree.

Do you have a tree this year? What color are your lights and ornaments?

Nashville Wife Christmas Tree

Our Christmas Decorations

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A few of my readers have asked that I post pictures of our Christmas decorations. I have to admit that we don’t have many. We have very limited storage space, and our little house is already full of non-Christmas decor. But I do enjoy decorating, so I’m hoping to do more in the coming years.This year, we bought a five-foot tree from The Home Depot. (When we have children, we definitely plan to make a tradition of visiting a Christmas tree farm to cut down our tree.) It’s a cute little tree and is the perfect size for our strand of colored lights and couple dozen ornaments, my favorite of which is the tree stump ornament I made last year for our first Christmas. We also put colored lights on the bush in front of our house.

We scored this cute “Noel” sign at a Dirty Santa/White Elephant gift exchange earlier this season.

This gold Christmas tree and porcelain angel are from my sister-in-law Anne. She purchased them from a thrift store for 50 cents each. Behind them, you can see the DIY stocking I sewed for Mr. Handsome’s birthday last year. Click here to watch the tutorial that I used.

And this is a small “Joy to the World” chalkboard sign that I made, using a glue gun to attach the little decorations. We also have the snow scene that Mr. Handsome painted hanging in our kitchen. Do you decorate for the holidays? Do you go all out?

Tree Stump Ornament

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Sometimes I fool myself into thinking I’m super creative. Last night was one of those times

I made this ornament out of a piece of stump from our Christmas tree. We would have loved to cut down our own tree, but my husband has a busy work schedule this month, so we went to Lowe’s. We chose a five-foot tree that was on sale for $20.

The employee who helped us find our tree was a sweet young man, probably in his late teenage years. He trimmed a few branches off the bottom and asked if I wanted to keep them, telling me they would look great as indoor decorations. I regretfully declined, knowing we would have no place to display them in our tiny, newlywed rental home.

He also asked if I wanted to keep the 1/2-inch thick slice of wood that he cut off the bottom of the stump. “Lots of people turn theirs into ornaments to commemorate their first Christmas as a married couple or their child’s first Christmas,” he explained.

“What a great idea!” I thought. So you’ll never guess what I did. I took the piece of stump home and turned it into an ornament.

The credit for this keepsake that we will cherish for years to come goes to the young man at Lowe’s. All I did was sand the edges (using a brick on the side of our house), drill a hole for the ribbon (using a screwdriver), and write “Our 1st Christmas Tree 2015” on both sides of the ornament (using red and green Sharpies). And I drew a Christmas tree.

I think the moral of the story is that the young man at Lowe’s is way more creative than I am.