How To Make A Little Christmas Tree For A Child

Well, the whole 'blog twice a week thing' has worked out splendidly thus far, assuming by 'blog twice a week' what I actually meant was completely forget to blog in over a month. In my defence, I have a very exciting shiny new job which is keeping me extremely busy, and rather than spending my evenings working on renovation projects and blogging about them as usual, I'm collapsing on the sofa every night with my laptop and a glass of wine as if I've been pole-axed. Hopefully things will settle down soon and we can figure out a new pace of life that factors in both working and transforming our still dreadfully red master bedroom.

Anyway, in between working and eating Christmas ham and making homemade chocolate mousse and decorating an eight foot tree (teeny tiny in comparison to last year's twelve foot behemoth), I made a Christmas tree for Eva. When I was a kid, my Dad surprised me with a little Christmas tree that he'd made by cutting the top off our Christmas tree from the year before, spray-painting it silver, and setting it into a wooden stand. From that point onwards it came out of the loft on the first of December every year, along with a box of increasingly straggly tinsel and sparkly decorations. Man, I loved that tree.

So I decided to make one for Eva. We cut the top off our twelve foot beast of a tree, stored it in the cellar to dry out for a year, and then earlier this month I found ten minutes to run outside when it was a) still light and b) not raining, and sprayed it silver.

Eva was delighted to discover it in her bedroom:

She promptly decorated it with swags of gold and silver tinsel, blue fairy lights, and the pink, blue and purple baubles that she'd personally selected from the garden centre a couple of weeks before. It also had surprise chocolate decorations on it, but someone *cough Natalia cough* found them and ate them.

I'm going to cut the top of this year's tree and save it for Natalia. Well, what's the point in having a giant cellar if you can't store large amounts of dried foliage in it?