Bah, humbug!

It's the holiday season but I haven't been able to focus on Christmas all that much aside from getting our tree up and pulling out the stockings. I feel very unorganized and scattered this year. I start to work on one project, like decorating the large bay window in our living room, and then get distracted by shopping online only to wind up planning a holiday menu. Sad part is, none of it actually gets completed. The window is only partially dressed, I still have shopping to finish, and I'm not sure what we'll be eating at dinner when the family comes over to visit other than smoked turkey and maybe some cheesecake bars.

But today I managed, with the assistance of copious amounts of coffee, to complete two pine cone swags for the bay window. The pine cones were craft show leftovers spray painted gold and silver. I used a hot glue gun to attach wide burgundy ribbon to the base of the silver cones and a sheer sage ribbon with gold stripes to the gold cones. (Without burning myself, which must count as a Festivus miracle if you ask me.) Once the glue set, I gathered the ribbons together so that the cones hung in a nice cluster, tied a knot at the end of the gathered ribbon, and clipped the free ends of the ribbons nicely. No, the swags don't match in color and the gold swag is bigger than the silver one because I had more green ribbon than burgundy, but the rest of our holiday decor doesn't match either, so there.

Once the swags were done and hanging in the window, I had such a feeling of accomplishment that I decided to finally do something with the dried poppy pods that were also left over from the craft show. I whipped out the tacky glue and decorated the tops of one bunch of pods with scarlet glitter and the second bunch with reddish-gold glitter. Admittedly this is only one step above making angel tree ornaments out of dried macaroni and pipe cleaners, but together the two bunches make a nice bouquet in a dark wood vase.

Feeling pleased with myself I decided to clean up the craft debris and make myself a snack of salsa and chips. It wasn't until I had nearly finished the salsa that I noticed that it looked awfully festive. Sparkly, even. As in scarlet and gold sparkly. I'm not sure how, but some of the glitter wound up garnishing my salsa. At least I hadn't been eating bits of pine cone.

Maybe I should cut back on the coffee tomorrow.