Christmas Decorating

All my holiday decorating this year revolved around  "brown paper packages tied up with string".  I fell in love with the idea of simply wrapped gifts so I bought brown paper at Home Depot (The kind painters use to cover the floor while they work.  Do you have any idea how inexpensive that stuff is? Compared to wrapping paper it's practically free. And it's recyclable.  Double win.) and some twine and wrapped everything up.  That's when my idea didn't seem so great anymore.  The presents looked sad.  Really sad.  I realized that I couldn't transition from sparkly gifts to plain gifts in just one year, the shock to my glitter-loving heart was too great.  I had to pretty them up.  I bought all kinds of red ribbon and had fun tying beautiful bows on my brown gifts.  They no longer looked sad, I thought they were gorgeous.  Now that the presents were tied up in red, I decided to do everything in red.  I wrapped the tree in Magic Mesh (which I have never worked with before but I liked) and dug out ornaments from years past and ended up with a red and white tree.  Instead of something large and fancy on the top I did a spray of wire loops and curls and I think I liked it better than any other tree-topper I've ever made.  It all felt simpler than what I usually do and I loved that.  Less is more, even at Christmas.  

I also downloaded a picture collage app that I am having way too much fun using.