Thursday, December 31, 2009

My favorite Christmas gifts of 2009

Where has the time gone? I wanted to write a quick post showing my favorite gifts from this Christmas.

This birdsong clock was given to me by my oldest son. He purchased it from the "shop" at our church's Advent festival. I love it. It still surprises me to hear a bird "talking" on the hour every hour, but it's a welcome surprise.



In school my oldest son also made us this PEACE plaque. As you can see, he glued different types of beans and seeds to form each letter. I love it so much!



The snowman plate was my little boy's gift to me. He bought it at the church Advent festival. I've taken down all of our Christmas decorations, but my baker's rack has lots of snowman items on it which I will leave up throughout January and into February. So this plate now has a place of prominence on one of the shelves. I will treasure it every year as I pull it out to decorate our home in the wintertime.



The holly teapot is a gift from my mom. She bought it at my favorite local thrift store and I have already had several cups of Christmas tea poured from it. I will be on the lookout for a matching cup and saucer.




A close-up of the holly motif



The next photos show some great after-Christmas deals I picked up at my favorite thrift store. All the Christmas items were marked down to 75% off this week. I will probably give the two little metal signs shown below as gifts next year. They cost me a whopping 63 cents each!!




I had my eye on this white metal snowflake wreath every time I went into the thrift store during December. I told myself to wait and see if was still there after Christmas and I was so excited to see that it was!! It's original price was $9 and I bought it for $1.13!! Yay for me! It is on the top shelf of my baker's rack right now and will stay there throughout January and February.




Close-up of the metal snowflakes. I love finding great home decor at thrift stores. You can get some awesome bargains. I forgot to take a photo of it but I also bought a really awesome Christmas wreath for my door at the thrift store for 50% off about a week or two before Christmas. That means I paid only $5 for a wreath that would probably be at least $40 at Hobby Lobby.



After Christmas we also bought 4 boxes of 9-foot pine garland with lights from Target at 50% off. We are planning to put them outside on our deck next year. Our outdoor Christmas decor could definitely be beefed up. We also got a stand for a real Christmas tree at 50% off so we'll have it ready for our REAL tree next year. I'm excited about that.
I hope you are all enjoying your end of the year festivities. We will be staying home tonight as we always do. Our New Year's Eve tradition is to pull out the couch in the living room and eat pizza in our jammies and watch movies together. DH is in town picking up the pizza right now and my little boy is asleep on the couch!! Not sure what the big boy is doing..........he's downstairs. Yesterday he started a "news" scrapbook and I think he's working on it right now. I am planning to pull out my scrapbooks from 1999 and 2000 to look through tonight. It was just DH and I back then as we didn't have children yet. I am going to make him sit and reminisce with me. He's already been forewarned. I haven't seen the spark of enthusiasm that I'd hoped for, but he agreed to look at them with me. I am pretty sure that he will enjoy looking back once we get going.
Check back here tomorrow because if all goes well I am going to "unveil" the project I've been working hard on behind the scenes. I'm super-excited about it. Happy New Year!!

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