It's Never Too Early!

My kids will tell you that I have a hard core rule at our house.  No celebrating Christmas until after Thanksgiving.  I am really bothered by stores that put out their Christmas decorations before Halloween and stores that are open on Thanksgiving.

For this year only, I'm softening on that rule.  And there's good reason for it - We won't be home over Thanksgiving week and we are hitting the slopes with our Utah family after Christmas.  We won't be home much to enjoy all the work it takes to set everything up.  It's also a new house, so I'm excited to decorate it and make or buy new items to make our home a coastal Christmas paradise!

Today I started on some new Christmas decorations.  A few years a go I did some salt dough ornaments with stamping for present tags.  They turned out so awesome!  I saw THIS idea on Pinterest and thought, I can do that!  I'll either use them as ornaments on our tree or sting them up with some twine for a garland.  I plan to spray paint mine a white color (I used Real Salt brand salt and it's not dyed so it's this natural color) and then spray them with an acrylic sealant.

When we were kids, we made salt dough ornaments with my mom.  It was fun to use cookie cutter and paint our own ornaments.  Here's a simple recipe for it:

2 c. flour

1 c. salt

3/4-1 c water

After shaping the ornaments (and don't forget to include the hole if you plan to use them for an ornament), place them on a cookie sheet and dry them for a few hours in the oven set to 200.

Here are some other ideas I have in mind for our decorations this year.  You can use the same recipe, use a shell cookie cutter and then a stamp before drying them.

Here is the same idea with an ink stamp like I did a few years ago:

I can't wait to get things decorated.  After not even having a tree (our felt tree on the wall doesn't count) last year, this year it will look like Christmas threw up on our house!