-- Merry Christmas Everyone --

Well everyone, its the day before, the night before, Christmas so today is as good as any to share a Happy Holidays greeting!  If you are taking some time off over the holidays we hope you have a wonderful, relaxing time and if you are working, we hope you enjoy it as much as possible.


Have a wonderful holiday!

-- Christmas Greetings --

Do you send out Christmas cards?

Last year we threw around the idea of sending out photo Christmas cards but we sort of chickened out and just sent regular greeting cards to our close friends and family.

This year everyone else's Christmas cards got me thinking again so I decided to play around with some family pictures that we had taken earlier this year.

from Shutterfly

from TinyPrints

from TinyPrints

from Shutterfly

from TinyPrints

So I went ahead and order a set and they just arrived in the mail.  We settled on a Shutterfly design for this year but I was really tempted by a bunch of the options from TinyPrints.  Since we haven't mailed them to our friends and family yet, I won't share the final choice just yet but will later on in the season.

-- Christmas Vignette --

In celebration of Holiday Vignette Day, which Courtney is hosting at A Thoughtful Place, I wanted to share my the way I've styled my hall table for Christmas.

Around our house we typically stick with a red, white and silver colour scheme but when I found these shiny green candle holders on sale last year I knew I had to have them.  In order to avoid the red and green thing though I'm trying to keep the green fairly removed from anything red.

Of course, this is still a hall table so I needed to include a little dish for random small items that need a place to live until I get a chance to put them away.

Trying to keep the heights varied, I also brought in a green glass luminary that I got a Crate and Barrel earlier this year and some acrylic letters that spell "JOY" my favourite Christmas word (it shows up all over the house).

Hey, neat, I can see my reflection in some of the globes :)

We also got a chance to put up our garland on the banister.  I've posted about this before but its basically a wire garland with lights, glitter-y cording, and silver and red globes mixed in.

In other SUPER EXCITING NEWS - my amazingly talented husband was featured in a Holiday Gift Guide by the folks at Custom Made.  So he's created 10 limited edition end grain cutting boards to be featured.  We are so excited for this great exposure and I'm especially proud!!

If you happen to be in the market for a handmade Christmas gift for a friend or loved one, we would love for you to check out the gift guide and get in touch.  We also just finished up some edge grain cutting boards that we are selling for almost 50% off the regular price for the holidays.  All are priced between $20 and $40 and are a cinch to ship within North America!  If you are interested, send me a message or leave a comment and I'll be in touch!

-- 2011 Advent Calendar --

Over the weekend I made another project that I had pinned to Pinterest.  This one was specifically for my husband Lucas.  He's a fairly awesome guy to have around and he goes crah - ray - zee over Christmas so I wanted to do something that would make the season seem really great.

- Lucas if you are reading... avert your eyes :) -

The idea came from here and the premise is simple - its an advent calendar so they open an envelope each day that contains either a compliment, a special treat or a plan for some time spent together.  I included about a third of each.

My first step was making 24 messages.  This was seriously the hardest part for me.  I consulted my calendar to make sure we weren't planning a date night on an evening where I knew I'd have to stay late at work etc...  I made mine using simple text boxes in MS Word and printed them out on regular printer paper.

My messages ranged any where from cheesy compliments, to free back massages, to a night planned walking around a local park to check out the Christmas lights.

I also printed out some numbers in a neat font (here's a link to the numbers that I used) and glued them onto some Christmas-y printed scrapbooking paper.

Then I inserted the messages in a larger rectangle of a coordinating scrapbooking paper which I folded into a mini envelope.

After sticking my date/number label on top of the envelope opening I had my little advent packages...

What?  You use your treadmill for running?  Whatever...

I chose to hang each of the envelopes on our tree with a little ornament hanger.

And then....

This happened 2 hours later while Lucas was watering the tree.

Such disappointment.

We had a few casualties in the form of broken ornaments and soaked advent packages.  But I just finished redecorating the tree.  Lets just say that decorating it the second time was not quite as satisfying as the first time.  I'll share the finished product later this week.

Visit here for other Christmas craft projects:

-- Chicken Noodle Soup --

Sunday Soup Night this week was totally comfort food.  We spent most of the weekend working on Christmas projects for friends and family and getting some decorating done... Lucas is now affectionately calling himself Santa every time he heads into his workshop and me - Mrs. Claus :)  Here's a sneak peek at what Mrs. Claus was up to this weekend...

Knowing that we would be ready to kick back on Sunday evening to recover we put a chicken on the BBQ rotisserie with the plan for chicken noodle soup.  Here's what we ended up with after mixing the chicken, carrot, onion, celery, garlic, chicken stock and spices.  I particularly enjoyed the addition of some chilli powder.

Oh, we did add noodles as well, some miniature bows, actually.  They aren't pictured because we decided to cook them separately and just add them to our actual bowl.  This went a long way in ensuring that the pasta didn't swell too much... in fact it was *perfect*

Lucas might convert me into a soup lover after all ;-)