Over the past few days I have completed a number of items off my Christmas checklist.

1. Decorating: the decorations are the best they are going to get for this year!
2. Shopping: I have been able to get out a few times and complete my list
3. Wrapping: while my son is asleep I’ve pulled everything out and wrapped it all:)
4. Baking: this weekend is crazy with social obligations so I got out the bake goods and baked some cookies. (Now we are already for the Christmas Parties)

I baked Chocolate Candy Cane Cookies:

I found this recipe on Epicurious webiste

The ingredients needed for the chocolate cookie:

• 1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (preferably Dutch-process)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 large egg

The ingredients needed for the filling:

• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons powdered sugar
• 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 3/4 teaspoon peppermint extract
• 2 drops (or more) red food coloring

• 1/2 cup crushed red-and-white-striped candy canes or hard peppermint candies

Once you have all your ingredients together, this recipe is fairly simple

Whisk together flour, salt and cocoa

In a seperate bowl, mix together sugar, butter and an egg

Add dry ingredients into the egg mixture

Freeze dough for 1hr

Take a tablespoon worth of dough and roll into a ball. Then take a cup and flatten the dough till it’s 2″ in width.

Bake at 350 for about 10 mins.

While the cookies are cooling:

Beat sugar and butter in medium bowl, add peppermint extract and 2 drops food coloring. Beat until light pink and well blended. Spread 2 generous teaspoons filling on 1 cookie to edges and top with another cookie. Finally, roll the cookie in crush peppermint and your done!

Christmas is quickly approaching and it is time for our Christmas tour. This being our first year in our house and in the middle of renovating, I have had to limit the decorating to our hallway, family room, dining room and outside. I hope to hit some great sales after Christmas and decorate my little heart out next year! I am joining the Nesting Places Christmas tour.

In the mud room, when you enter the house I added a few Christmas items. The great thing about snowman is that you can leave them up after Christmas!

After you take your coat off you enter the hallway:

If you turn to your left and enter through the glass doors, you would be in our family room:

I tried to put the toys away but my son pulls them right back out!

I hung little wreaths in each window:

Here is the table in our family room:

Our piano mantel:

The only gift under the tree (I’d better get shopping!)

Our fireplace mantel:

And another angle:

Looking into the hallway:

Now if you look into the dining room (soon to be our kitchen!) our table looks like this:

On top of our china cabinet, I put extra Christmas balls into our punch bowl:

I hung a wreath in the window:

I added a few snowmen accents in this room as well:

Here are some outside pics:

I will add some pictures of the house in the daylight tomorrow:)

I spent this morning while my son was taking a nap shoveling the snow from the storm that passed through. Shoveling is one of my least favourite winter activities. Actually there isn’t anything about the snow that I do like so let’s just say I was not in the best of moods. But after making myself a nice hot cup of hot chocolate, I realized that now it actually is starting to feel like Christmas.

Last week, my husband, son and myself ventured out to the local tree from to cut down a tree for that window area of our living room. This is the first year we have gone to get a tree in the rain and mud! I wasn’t slipping on ice to find the perfect tree, nope, it was mud. Every few feet my husband would hear me scream as I tried to regain my balance. It was all worth it when we did find our perfect tree. Here is what it looks like in our living room:

I don’t know if I have mention that our house was built in 1890 so it is old and we have very high ceilings. Our goal was to find the tallest tree we could find and not have to pay a fortune. This tree, with the tree topper, sits about an inch from the ceiling. Our colour scheme for the last couple of years for our tree is red and apple green. We also have snowmen accents. Here are a few examples:

I have green, matte and glossy red balls and some sentimental ornaments in there as well. Here is another picture of our tree in our new home:

I’m joining Thrifty Decor Chick’s Christmas tree party:

My girlfriends daughter is turning 2 today and we were invited to her birthday party yesterday. So when Saturday came around and I still didn’t have a gift I decided to get my thinking cap on. My girlfriend told me she needed nothing so that didn’t give me a lot to go on. I decided to help bring out this little girls artistic side! I came up with the idea to make a chalkboard easel. I was going to make it from scratch and then I got looking in my attic and found an easel I wasn’t using anymore. I then got thinking I could reuse this easel and attach a framed chalkboard. Once I came up with the gift, I then had to go out and gather a few supplies. I went to the local thrift store and picked up a picture of a lovely framed landscape picture. It was $15 and I liked the shape and size of the frame. I then went to Walmart for some girly decals and the hardware store for some chalkboard paint. When I got home this is what I had:

(My son came along for the ride!)

The first thing I did was take the frame apart and sand the landscape picture down till it was smooth.

Once the board was smooth, I gave it a coat of chalkboard paint with a foam roller.

While the first coat of paint was drying, I took the frame outside and gave it a coat of white with spray paint. I then went inside and started working on the easel. The easel was a little bit wobbly so I tightened all the screws.

I then gave the easel a coat of paint (left over from another project.)

After 2 hours, I gave the board another coat of paint and then allowed it to dry over night. The next morning I brought the frame in and rubbed some dark brown glaze in all the little nook’s and cranny’s. To give the frame an antique finish.

When the frame was dry, I put the chalkboard back in the frame and fastened it with a couple of nails and then some liquid nail. (Actually, my husband helped me with this step!)

When the liquid nail dried, I painted the back of the frame white.

It didn’t take the paint very long to dry, which was good because I was dying to see the frame on the easel! I held the frame and my husband screwed the frame in place from the back of the easel.

The last thing I did was hot glue gunned some cute little flower decals on around the frame.

And here it is, my vision came to life!

I would say this project cost me:

easel – free

paint – free

chalkboard paint – $10 (but I have half a can left for another project!)

picture frame – $15

decal and spray paint – $5

Grand Total – $30

another artistic future blogger – priceless!!!

I have slowly been working on my living room since moving into this house in July. We painted a month ago and I have trying to put up more things on the walls. In my living room, I have a fireplace and an antique piano. I have not really started to even think what should be placed on these mantels for any other season but Christmas. When we first laid eyes on the living room my husband pointed to a corner of the room with windows and said “that is where our Christmas tree has to go!” So since July, our thoughts have been on Christmas for this room. I was saying in my previous post that I got like 5 boxes of Christmas decorations from my last visit. Well I pulled everything out of the boxes and began pulling apart the left over wreaths I hadn’t used for my Christmas tree urns and laid them along my mantels. I placed one of the wreaths in the center of the fireplace mantel and began placing pine cones and berries into the garland. I cut some branches from a shrub on the side of my house and placed it in a reddish vase on the mantel. I also picked up at a local thrift store 4 stocking holders. They were gold so I spray painted them copper and placed our initials on red paper in the frames. After adding a few more elements, here is what our fireplace mantel looks like:

And a close up:

* for those of you that noticed I only put up three little Christmas tree holders, very good:) I thought I’d better get another holder in case I can ever talk my husband into another child!

For my piano mantel, I wanted to incorporate copper and snowman elements. I laid out my garland and put two little Christmas trees on the center of the mantel. I found two cute little snowman out of my Grandma boxes and placed them on either end of the mantel. I purchased two vine balls and some copper branches and stuck them in around the garlandl. I added a few pine cones and some other rustic pieces. Here is what the piano mantel looks like:

And the close up:

Not too bad for our first year!