From two-year-olds to adults, everyone loves finding hidden treasure—and Easter time is the perfect season for satisfying that desire by having an Easter egg hunt in your very own yard.
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Everyone knows that newlyweds usually don’t have much money when they first get married. Not having the extra cash to spend on home decorating can be especially bothersome around Christmastime, but don’t worry! Decorating on a budget is fun and can bring a newlywed couple closer together as they create new holiday traditions.
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The fall holiday season is just great; especially for kids (of all ages). Involving your children in holiday decorating allows you to share a very positive activity with them and gives you the opportunity to teach them something about the holiday at the same time.
When the holiday in question is Thanksgiving, there are a number of décor components children can find to make your Turkey Day table festive. Colored leaves are a great place to start. You can even make a game of finding them and give prizes for the biggest, most colorful and prettiest leaves. Be sure to collect a lot of leaves, and gently wash and pat them dry before using in your décor.
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A Victorian Christmas Tree: Get the Look for Your Home
A Victorian Christmas tree is all about over-the-top opulence and excessive detail. The Victorian Christmas tree style started in 1841 when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert put one up and all of England followed suit. Victorian Christmas trees do not use the traditional red and green coloring that is typical today. Instead, more elegant colors were used, such as dusty roses, brilliant blues, deep burgundies, delicate ivories, and sparkling gold.
Victorian Christmas trees were often decorated with small toys, candy, popcorn strings, fruits, nuts, handmade ornaments, and baked goods. Individual candles were originally used, but with the invention of string lights the use of clear white lights are a much safer option for today’s Victorian Christmas trees.
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If there’s one food that embodies Christmas to perfection, it’s gingerbread. Bake it, and your entire house smells like a holiday. Nibble it, and you’re transported to Christmas past. But what elevates gingerbread above a mere seasonal treat is its decorative quality. Turn it into ornaments and gifts, and every tree or tabletop it touches seems joyous. Even its monkish hue, which may not look very festive, is a warm and amiable backdrop for whimsical shapes and fanciful icing in any color you like.
The gingerbread cookie was the favorite Christmas treat of early-American children. It became popular because it was inexpensive to make and resilient enough to withstand the vagaries of wood- and coal-fired ovens. Gingerbread enthusiasts, however, like to point out that gingerbread became beloved for its taste—that inimitable combination of molasses, ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg—and for the fun it provides.
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What could be more glorious than a holiday table laden with fruit? Fruit is nature’s bounty and an eloquent symbol of its richness. The Dutch and Flemish masters immortalized fruit, as well as flowers, in their prettiest still lifes. But it was the French, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who refined fruit centerpieces into soaring pyramids of glistening cherries and grapes; elaborate epergnes whose branches were filled with strawberries, figs, and miniature apples; or a single golden pineapple served up on a pedestal.
The French built centerpieces in a variety of vessels, mixing real fruit, flowers, and leaves with ceramic fruit. Sometimes the fruit was meant to be eaten, and other times not, since some of the techniques to make a pyramid stable, like drizzling warm caramel over the arrangement or pouring water over it so it would ice, made the display purely decorative. But then a fruit centerpiece was designed less to be tasted than to dazzle and to amuse.
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Creating an elegant centerpiece for your holiday table doesn’t have to be difficult. There are a few basic rules you can use to build a centerpiece for any holiday you want to commemorate; the rest, as they say, depends on you.
First of all, make sure that whatever centerpiece you design isn’t so tall that it will interfere with people seated on opposite sides of your table seeing and speaking with each other. There’s nothing worse than trying to unobtrusively crane your neck to see around a centerpiece that blocks your view! Think low and wide rather than tall and narrow.
Then choose a container to hold the main body of the centerpiece. This can be anything that catches your fancy; perhaps a unique wicker basket, your grandmother’s heirloom fine china compote or a fabulous art pottery bowl. Inside this main container, place another, slightly smaller leak proof plastic or glass “liner” container with a profile sufficiently lower than the main container. If there’s enough space between the two containers to allow the liner to wiggle, stuff the space with foam or wadded up newspaper to keep everything stable.
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Put the ‘Boo’ Back in your Yard this Halloween: Quick, Fun and Cheap Decorating Projects
Thinking of going all out in decorating your yard for Halloween this year? There’s certainly no reason not to—Halloween decorations are inexpensive and fun to make, and the effects on others, especially young children in your neighborhood, can be fun to watch as well.
Go through the family closets and find the oldest, rattiest clothes to use for dressing scarecrows. That pair of jeans you reserve for really messy tasks like painting the garage door or hauling trash to the dump will be perfect. Then gather up some white trash bags with pull closures, some small rags and an old broom an get started building your scarecrow. Stuff a small trash bag with rags for the head. When the bag is big enough and fairly round, tie it off and draw a face on it using permanent ink markers. Attach the head to the bottom of a small broom, secure a piece of wooden doweling crosswise under the neck, then dress your scarecrow, pulling a long-sleeved shirt over the dowel “arms” and a pair of jeans or trousers over the broom handle body. You can use the same process to make ghost heads and complete their ghostly look by tying old white sheets around the base of the “neck.”
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Getting a whole new look for a room doesn’t always have to mean repainting the walls, replacing the flooring, or buying a brand new set of furniture. It’s much easier to transform the interior look of a room by changing out a few key items to give it a fresh new look without draining your bank account. Changing your décor seasonally can give a room an instant lift without spending too much money or exerting too much effort. Try matching the room to the season by using floral patterns in the spring, pastels in the summer, plaids in the fall, or blues and whites in the winter.
Tired of looking at that same old sofa and chair year after year? Instead of getting new furniture, why not invest in one or two slipcovers to give your room an instant makeover? You’ll be amazed how different a room will look with new slipcovers. You can choose one or two solid colors as a base to add patterned throw pillows to or you can choose a specific patterned slipcover that will go well with your room’s main color scheme. It’s all up to you!
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