Retro wife’s home-made Christmas

It’s like an episode of Nigella’s Christmas ’round at our house at the moment. Actually it’s not really. My preparation for Christmas has yet to involve any food but there is a lot of preparation going on, just nothing edible. Yet.

The small folk have been roped into our slightly more frugal Christmas preparations this year. And seeing as they have yet to cough up a bean in rent since they moved in with us, I’m not feeling too guilty about engaging them in a bit of hard labour at the end of their busy daytime schedules.

In the spirit of our new, more frugal, less impactful  lifestyle, I have decided that 2009 is the year of the home-made Christmas gift . I know, I know, you’re thinking just how amazingly lucky our family and friends are. What a treat they are in for.

For quite a few of our Christmas gifts we are capitalising on the fact that lots of our family appear to be almost as in love with our children as we are and any photographs or pictures that either feature my lovely littles, or were produced by the small fair hands, appear to go down a storm. I bought Wilkinson and M&S  out of their very, very cheap and fabulous picture frames.

So that’s the first lot of pressies marked off the list: 1. Framed photos of our gorgeous boys for grandparents and their aunty and uncle.

2. Framed pictures, produced by the next generation of Saatchi acclaimed artists (yep, that’s our boys if you weren’t clear on that). Since the last round of friends’ babies put in appearance in the summer, my knitting needles have been gathering dust in the corner of our front room. Lately I have been itching to produce things other than baby cardigans and baby toys. The Ellis family home-made Christmas has given me the perfect opportunity.

And also I can now mark the next lot of pressies off the list: 3. tea cup cosys (which we are giving with gorgeous, gorgeous mini tea houses and bags of peppermint tea leaves from Whittards). 2. I am also in the middle of producing a knitted hot water bottle too – but no pics of that just yet as am nowhere near finished it yet!

Even our lovely ladies in the garden (the chickens) are also contributing to our home-made Christmas and have produced a plentiful supply of eggs lately. Enough for me to do some pickling for the people in our life who are partial to a pickled egg or two with their fish & chips or salt and vinegar crisps.  I think these jars are so lovely, that they look better unwrapped, with a few bits of ribbon to give them a little sparkle.

And our lovely boys have done a sterling job producing these little bundles of Christmas tree decorations, which we will be giving to our friends and family as small stocking fillers and as little gifts for our eldest’s teachers and friends.

Here’s how we made them:

Make a basic salt-dough mixture:

1 cup flour

1/2 cup salt

1 cup boiling water

1tbsp oil

roll out and cut into Christmas shapes (the boys chose stars)

then harden them off in the oven

once cooled, get the little folk to daub them liberally with paint

once paint has dried, cover them in glue and dunk them in glitter

to stop the glitter coming off, and to give them a nice shiny finish, I gave them a quick coat of varnish, threaded string through the hole I had made in them before baking, wrapped them up in lovely red tissue paper and placed them under the tree.  Marvelous.

Last night I did quite a lot of present wrapping (my least favourite job at Christmas time). It was made slightly better as I was wrapping with the paper that the children made a few weeks ago. I think it looks lovely. Well done my lovely boys!

And with all that done, what I would really like to do now is retire to bed for at least a month. But with Mike’s mum arriving for her Christmas weekend tomorrow, and an, as yet, unplanned meal, I’d better get on.

Merry Christmas xx