How to Decorate a Massive Christmas Tree
Happy Christmas! I’m Alice, and I like power tools and massive Christmas trees. You can find loads of pictures of our DIY Victorian house renovation in south Manchester on my Instagram account, or on this blog.
We first bought a huge Christmas tree seven years ago during our first festive season in our new (old) Victorian house. Prior to this, we’d stuck with the normal variety from the garden centre or local greengrocer - but I felt our newly acquired 13 foot ceilings demanded something a little more spectacular, so off to Ivy Cottage Christmas Tree Farm in Wilmslow we went. I selected an absolutely huge beast with no consideration for how big it actually was, or how on earth we’d get it home (we just about stuffed it into the car with the tip hanging out the front passenger window, and the trunk hanging out the boot). After wrestling it into the house, we opened the net, and realised it was at least six feet wide and took up the entire width of the living room, meaning we then spent a month crawling underneath it in order to open and close the curtains.
The first ever massive tree. I didn’t have anywhere near enough fairy lights or baubles and couldn’t afford to buy more, so I made salt dough stars with the girls to decorate it.
From this point onwards, a new tradition was set - for the month of December, we move a massive fir tree into our house and live with it for at least four weeks. After a couple of years of this we realised that not only will Ivy Cottage deliver, but that you can visit in October, tag your tree while it’s still growing in the ground, and then have it cut down on the chosen delivery day, meaning it’s still pretty fresh and lively six weeks later. We now sometimes even keep ours up until our daughter’s birthday in January…!
One of my favourite trees is from 2016 - we were in the process of renovating our living room after living with the 80s decor for four years, but that didn’t stop us from installing our usual house guest :-) By this stage I had switched to our now classic red and white Scandinavian-style decor.
A small Christmas elf helping with the fairy lights.
This is last year’s effort. Each year, I add new decorations - this one has folded paper stars and plaited baskets from previous years, along with new fir cones. We collected these from the local park in the autumn, dried them, lightly sprayed them silver, and wired them straight onto the tree.
Another festive helper. Our middle daughter adores decorating the tree, I think mostly because she’s allowed to climb up the stepladder which would normally be out of bounds :-)
And this year’s beauty. I’ve added about 50 metres of red and white beads, layered on in swags. I’ve also got homemade clay stars from last year, printed with lace left over from my wedding dress. I haven’t added this year’s decorations yet - strings of acorns and conkers on red and white twine; again gathered from the park, sprayed bronze, and draped around the tree. Close to the big day, I will also add candy canes that we plan to get the girls to make with red fondant icing and white peppermint icing, and gingerbread stars and hearts (hung well out of the reach of the doggies!).
Decorated while teetering precariously on top of a step ladder, obviously.
