Last year's garland and wreaths
With this in mind we forced ourselves this past Saturday to get out the door and find a tree. We went to a nearby “you cut ’em” Christmas tree farm and found an acceptable option, currently sitting in our barn where we stowed it when we got home. We’ll decorate it Christmas Eve. Although there were numerous options available to find a tree on Saturday, getting our hands on roping and wreaths was another matter. Our usual sources were not only picked over, but mostly picked clean. The early-birds got there first. We bought the last bundle of plain-as-Jane white pine roping that our local florist had, in sad contrast to the long-gone boxwood roping we usually get. We found some more white pine roping at our local supermarket, of all places, so I think we’re ok in that department, particularly if we double it up to make thicker garlands. However, the only wreaths we found were desiccated, smashed, and showering needles, so no luck there.
We usually put up half a dozen or so wreaths at Darlington – one on the smaller of our two barns, another on our workhouse, and the rest on the house. So when we returned with nary a wreath to hang we thought it was a pathetic situation, indeed. Although we’re planning on going to the flower district in Manhattan to buy magnolia branches to decorate the drawing room at Darlington for our party, we wondered would we have to buy our wreaths there as well? The thought of doing so seemed extravagant and wasteful -- why not just burn our cash while we’re at it?
Fed up with the whole thing I decided that my time would be better spent working on my blog for the rest of the afternoon. But Boy came up with a brilliant idea. He would make a wreath for the front door at Darlington, so we would at least have something on our house to alert passers by that its inhabitants were not so slothful that they couldn’t at least bring themselves to find a single wreath. So off he went to one of our barns and set to work.
Boy shows how it's done
The finished product
(Ignore door color, it's the undercoat)
So lessons learned here include:
- The early bird does, in fact, get the worm;
- You don't have to buy your wreaths, you can make them easily enough if you have the tools and sufficient ingenuity; and
- The prospect of making 5 more wreaths is sufficiently daunting that we probably will end up buying the rest of them at the flower district after all...
I am suitably impressed. No, more than suitably. Enthusiastically:).
ReplyDeleteHmmm, decorating with magnolia branches. We have a magnolia in the back yard. I will have to try using the branches this Christmas.
ReplyDelete