I can't help it, I am a Christmas person, any excuse to put a truck load of sparkly stuff in my home!
I always love posting pictures of my tree, to me it means it's officially Christmas in the Claridge household.
This year my theme is black, white and gold, I have my white tree from last year, but I limited my colour pallet, re-used a lot of decorations from my collection and added a few new home-made ones too. I made theses sparkly diamonds out of 5 gold pipe cleaners at 10p each, cheap and cheerful.
I bought some rustic wooden hearts from Hobbycraft and painted them white with a different black pattern on each one, they make a great addition to the tree, and a bargain at around £1.75 each (including ribbon and paint)
The only ornaments I splashed out on this year was these little ceramic owls, they were £3 each from our local Shaw Trust charity shop, so they made me feel good as the money was for charity and how cute are they! The stars are another home-made addition to the tree, I used air drying clay and a cookie cutter. Then painted them white, with gold liquid leaf paint on the edges.
This Christmas is going to be different for us this year as it will be the first one without my Grandpa who passed away in March. He was such a huge part of our celebrations and we will miss him loads, but I know he will be with us in our memories. He wouldn't have wanted us to be sad and miss him, so we are scheduling lots of games and movies to keep us entertained. In honour of G'pa there may even be some very bad carol singing.
I hope you enjoyed that little peek at our decorations for this year, I would love to hear about your decorations, If you have posted any pictures, pop a link in the comments so we can head over and take a look.
Have a magical, festive weekend
Sammy xxx