Anyway, this will be the last one before the 2013 - given that next Tuesday is Christmas, and we'll all be in some kind of food coma/drunken stupor - so please please get linking up, old posts are fine as I've missed quite a bit, and I'd particularly like to see anything festive you've been creating. [Hmm, the Tuesday after is New Year's Day, so perhaps we should reconvene on January 8th].
I've finally made my wreath for outside the house - it would have been on the door but it weighs several pounds and I couldn't figure out how to attach it short of hanging it from the knocker. Also it seemed a little unfair on the postman to have to navigate past all the unruly prickly bits in order to bang on the door. Last year I had one made of willow and fake berries - very pretty but with an unfortunate side effect they didn't mention on the sweetie darling yummy mummy over-priced website I was silly enough to have bought it from. It stank. Seriously, imagine a tramp's boots donated to that charity shop. The one you avoid because it reeks. I have no idea why it smelled so bad, but it got embarrassing to open the door, get a whiff and notice people wondering why my porch smelled like the rhino area at Longleat safari park. It had to go.
Instead I've spent the morning wandering shiftily around our local cemetery with secateurs in hand, trying to find interesting greenery. So, here's my attempt - it's in a soaked oasis wreath base so hopefully it will survive at least a week. Despite what a friend on Facebook suggested, I did not remove the finished result from anyone's grave. Honest.
Ok, there may still be a few stinky berries on it.
The bloody birds have eaten all the real ones. Pure selfishness.
Rustic
{that outside light has never worked. I don't even know where the switch is}
It was harder than you'd imagine to find holly, but I finally found a small bush right over to the far side of the cemetery near a section of tiny children's graves which are overgrown and clearly no longer visited. All aside from one - decorated with tinsel and flowers - belonging to a little boy who died aged two back in the 1940s. It was bitter-sweet to imagine a by now presumably very elderly parent or sibling still coming and making it pretty for Christmas, amongst all those that have been long neglected. While I was roaming around, I also discovered this grave:
Intriguing huh? Turns out that Winchester Cathedral suffered badly with subsidence in the early 1900's - cracks big enough for an owl to roost in, apparently - and the under-pinning was being hampered by the fact that the workmen's trenches filled with water faster than they could dig. So solo deep sea diver William Walker was brought in, and spent the next six years 20 feet underwater for six hours a day, in complete darkness, evacuating the flooded trenches and filling them with bags of concrete. Given that the Cathedral is still standing, he really can be said to have saved it with his own hands. He died of the Spanish flu after the First World War. [I have no idea how he ended up in South Norwood].
After all my adventures with greenery I hauled some more ivy in from the garden and have been pretending I have ye olde ancestral hall by draping it across mirrors and mantelpieces in the style I imagine Henry VIII might have liked.
How have you decorated? Kitsch or classic? Or both? Link up - I'll add some of last year's Christmas posts as I've been so slack this December so far. I do have a Christmas eBay special coming up though!
Lakota x
