3rd December 2016
Do you do a "spring clean"? I do general cleans (obviously) throughout the year, but I do try to do a thorough clean out of my house at least once a year...
Well, I try. I haven't actually done one in a very long time so recently I've been going through everything in my house and getting rid of a ridiculous amount of things that I will just never use again or don't want anymore. How do we acquire so much stuff? It's crazy. Today I cleared out the much neglected garage which finally marked the completion of my "spring clean" even though it's just turned into summer.
What does this have to do with Christmas, you ask? Often Christmas can be a holiday over overabundance, expense, and eventually waste (food in particular) so something that has been on my mind whilst I've been cleaning is the adage "reduce, reuse, recycle," elements of "less is more," and cost cutting, and I wondered how I could keep this in mind for Christmas this year. It doesn't always have to be with the environment directly in mind, as an aside I find that if I have less clutter it's easy to clean and I will be less likely to be a scatterbrained mess-maker, which I am notorious for.
Sometimes after Christmas all you want to do is throw all the decorations in a box and forget about it until next year, and the idea of Christmas shopping after Christmas sounds crazy, but a cost cutting tip for Christmas-specific shopping like decorations is doing it AFTER Christmas for the next year. Go through your decorations and make a list of things that you should really replace, those half broken baubles, old tacky decorations, or maybe your tree is looking really bare. Then, see if you can find them reduced in store. Here when Christmas is over they reduce the cost of Christmas stock by so much that it's worth at least looking. I got my Christmas lights, baubles, and (plastic) tree all very cheap in late December or early January. It's not the most out-there tip, and if you can't find it in the remnant stock then you might have to buy full price next Christmas anyway but it's worth a try!
As the December theme in my blog would suggest, you don't always have to buy straight from the store... DIY it! You could re-purpose some of your own items into Christmas decorations or jazz some of the old ones up again.
As the theme of today is basically reusing and cost-cutting, the things you have available to you to reuse in your house might be different to mine therefore you might have to go out and purchase some things I already had so instead I want this as more of an DIY inspiration than an instructional DIY post, and encourage you to make one DIY Christmas decoration out of something in your house that you've been thinking of throwing out, or redecorate an old bauble. Tweet a picture of it to me if you like @SeaCityCrafts with the hashtag #DIYDecemberDecoration.
My example for my own decoration is a mini Christmas tree I made to Christmas-up my computer desk. Do you Christmas up your desk? Going back to the de-clutter talk from before, I wouldn't have something too big on my desk as I need all the space I can get.
Mini DIY Christmas Tree
I used a cork from a craft bottle left over from a project last year, and green pipecleaners leftover from my DIY wreaths I've been making and putting onto cards. If you do want to make it though, I do have an instructional post below.
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