Holiday Creative Friday: DIY Christmas Trees

I vowed to be as present as possible this holiday. Mostly because ever since I was a child, Christmas would fly by so quick that I never quite enjoyed it.

I would be excited about Christmas Eve and look forward to Christmas day and then anticipated the moment when I would open every one of my presents. And then sitting in crumpled wrapping paper and torn off ribbons I’d ask: “Is that all?”

This year, I am taking it all in. Appreciating the lights, the presents and especially the decorations, as gifts to be unwrapped carefully.

I taught myself how to make my own snow globes. {The how-to is here.}

Filled an old mason jar with last year’s Target Christmas ornaments:

Put peace in a bowl. Thereby doing my part to contain peace.

And made my own Christmas trees this year with foam and pipe cleaners.

It’s probably my most favorite craft. I love the way it sparkles at night almost as much as I loved how quick and cheap they were to make. Basically all I did was buy silver pipe cleaners from Target and wrapped them around the foam. To get them to stay, I poked a hole in the Christmas tree shaped foam with and at the start of and at the end of the pipe clear.

Will definitely be saving these for next year.

The one that was a little harder to love, however, was my feather Christmas tree…Truthfully, they were not easy to do and did not come out as pretty as this blogger’s one. I laughed at them through my hot glue burns. They looked a little like a messed up chicken. And my bunny was not amused.

But I grew to love it. After slapping hot glue on the foam and stuffing feathers around them, I came out with this perfectly imperfect product:

I could have tossed it, chalked it up to another failed project. But I realized I had an opportunity here. Either I could abandon it, like we abandon the things about us we don’t like-our nose, our thighs, our imperfect handwriting scrawl or we could embrace it.

Don’t we all have a little imperfect feather tree in our lives? And are we going to continue to toss it, ignore it or fully embrace and love it for what it is? I chose the latter.

What will you choose in 2012?