Christmas Tree

Christmas decorating is more fun than Christmas Day - at least in my family. My mother and grandmother would put Martha Stuart to shame when it comes to decking the halls. Since I've moved to the Puget Sound Mom has tried to send ornaments from our family collection. I keep refusing because I know what its like to walk through the home of my childhood and feel like something is missing. Everything that says "Lacey lives here" is gone. That's no good. Therefore all my "baby's first Christmas" ornaments and macaroni art from kindergarten are still in Idaho decorating my parents tree. This of course means that my tree is empty.

To remedy this I held a Housewarming/Christmas Party in 2008. The idea was that friends would bring an ornament that reminded me of them. It was a great success. My favorites are from my nieces and nephews who each brought a hand-made salt dough ornament, and a co-worker brought a sock-monkey to remind me of an inside joke (we call ourselves shop-monkeys and welder-monkeys) and said co-worker also knew that I despise monkeys the way some people despise clowns.

I've decided to make the Christmas Party an annual affair. This year I'm making ornaments for my guests. I can't decide what to do, but let me show you some of the tutorials I'm interested in:

Salt-Dough Snowflakes & Gnomes:
Where in the world did she find those lovely cookie-cutters?

Ribbon Pine Cone Ornament:
I love this idea, it just looks time consuming.

Thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Any other ideas or tutorials would also be a plus. :-)

An another topic..... I'm finding it increasingly hard to get back on track with my writing. I've got an article on Pike Place Market in the works with some colorful pictures but my writer's block is making me nit-pick every word. Writing about home going-ons is so much easier and requires no research on my part. I'm giving myself a deadline: tomorrow. Any other day than today!