I don't know if I've ever spent as much time in my robe (or eaten as much pie) as I did this past weekend. It was awesome. Along with a lot of lazing around, we got our Christmas tree up and decorated, made a new advent calendar with mini galvanized buckets, and decked out our front door with a set of bells and some greenery and berry branches from our yard:
It's the easiest holiday door dec I've ever made. The star of the show is this set of rope animal bells that I bought on Amazon {here} for $21 and free 2-day shipping with Amazon Prime (as you probably know, prices fluctuate on Amazon so it may not be listed at the same price now). The online photo of the bell set isn't the greatest but they are so much more amazing than I expected:
I had planned to buy a garland from a local Christmas tree stand to make my door dec. But then I realized that would involve getting out of my robe to drive into town. So I just shopped my own yard. In my robe. Don't know why I hadn't thought to do it in the first place because I have the mother of all Christmas trees smack in the middle of our front yard:
The branches even have clusters of the cutest baby pinecones:
In our backyard, I scored some branches with red berries. Still in my robe. Ducking when cars passed by...
So what do you do once you've shopped your yard? The rest is simple. Layer your greenery and berry branches and cut the ends of the branches so that they're even:
Tie the branches together with a rubber band or two:
Hang them upside down from your front door hook with half of the branches on each side of the hook and then hang your three bells on top:
Tie a bow around the top (wire edged ribbon works best) where it hides the rubber bands:
Done!:
Did I tell you that I'm in love with these bells?
The whole thing took less than 30 mins. to make. And I love that I'll have the bells to reuse next year when I can mix things up by using different greenery and ribbon. Wouldn't it be gorgeous with magnolia branches?
I may add some greenery and ribbon to the lights on either side of our front door but I think that'll be about it. Sometimes simple is best.
I hope you all had some good R & R time this weekend too because you know we'll all be hitting the ground running each morning from now until the holidays...
