Back to Basics

On Saturday, I finally took down the Christmas tree and decorations. I seem to be reluctant at both ends of Christmas, reluctant to put up the decorations and reluctant to take them down. I'm sure I'll get used to the bareness of the house within a few days, but I miss those twinkly lights, making the room feel cosy.  Maybe I should keep a set back to use all winter.

Luckily, it's LB's birthday next weekend, so a few cards about the place will fill up the room a bit more.

Anyway, the decorations are back into the three or four storage bags, one for wrap, one for wreaths, one for decorations and one for the tree.  I did manage to declutter a few more items whilst I was packing everything away, which is all good.

I was reading somewhere the other day how if you want to be eco friendly, you should stop using plastic trees. It really didn't make any sense to me. 

If you've already got a plastic tree, why throw it out and stop using it.  Surely it's more eco friendly to continue to use it and then you wouldn't need to ever buy another or a real one.  Besides, many Charity shops (like ours) don't actually accept Christmas trees in January, as they don't want to give room to them for a year, before anyone is likely to buy them. So, despite preferring a real tree, I'm going to keep our artificial one and continue to use it, whatever anyone says.

After reading a great post on Where the journey takes me about re-using Christmas cards, I cut up those cards that seemed to make good Christmas gift tags and put them with my wrapping paper ready for next year. Here's a couple of pictures of the ones I made. 

A bit of a mixture, but I'm sure they'll look great on gifts with a bit of added ribbon.

After a quick dust and hoover around, it's like Christmas never happened. Oh well, I'm sure it will come round again soon enough. Best get on with 2018 now.