This is the first year that I can remember us not having a tree up for Christmas. All the rooms in our cottage are in various states of unfinishedness (I think I just made that word up!). We wanted some sort of festiveness, so decided to adorn the finished front doors. Yes, as our house was formerly two tiny cottages, we have two front doors. Rather than buy them, we downed decorating tools and picked up Christmas wreath making ones instead.

Our village is surrounded by mixed coniferous forest, so we didn’t need to venture far to forage for Christmas wreath raw materials. And, thanks to lots of very windy weather recently, it didn’t take us long to find lots of different kinds of fir, larch, spruce and pine fronds on the ground. Saying that, holly with its berries still intact was pretty scarce; I think the local and winter-visiting birds have been feasting on them.

I found it harder to do than I thought it would; Justin’s attempt was far superior in my opinion. He has a natural talent for flower & foliage arranging!

I tried to improve mine by embellishing it with a big, gold ribbon. What do you think?

Now that we have a pair of wire wreath frames, I think we’ll be making them every year – practice makes perfect!