A festive kitchen table

Again, I’m not quite sure what to say or how to tell you how much I appreciate your wonderful comments and emails. I wish I knew how to say thank you in a way that expresses it, other than just saying THANK YOU.

Right now, the Bub is sleeping, my father-in-law is asleep on the sofa, and my hubby and his sis are both on their laptops, so I thought I would join the party. ;) Today is the first day Hubs has been home much, after dealing with all of the arrangements. It’s been so nice, I must say. I even got him to help me work on the master closet – he finally went through his meeellions of t-shirts and we got rid of 60. That is 6-0 people. Wow.

I had pictures from our kitchen table loaded into Live Writer from last week, so I wanted to go ahead and show you part of our red and white Christmas kitchen.

I made these ornaments last year – I just filled them with curled up sparkly ribbon, faux snow and added some snowflake stickers:

The greenery I just stuff around the light fixture (which was a $30 find at Lowe’s – I have to mention this every. single. time. I show you this light). Then to add some red I just threw in some berries that were on a gift last year. Oh yeah, free!:

The ornaments are really adorable close up:

The centerpiece is fairly simple and has lots of white and red. I just filled the cloche with red ornaments, then placed it on the plate (Pier 1), and surrounded it with berry pics (clearance from Michael’s last year):

  

Everyone always asks how I do this – I turn the cloche over, fill it, then put the plate on and turn it all over. It’s one of those DUH things – you stare at it and try to figure it out. :)

The placemats were Dollar Store finds, but after taking pictures, I found them a bit busy. Do you ever do that? I do that all the time – taking a picture allows you to look at your decor in a different way.

I had a ton of ribbon from clearance sales last year, so I thought up a fun way to use it. I took foam circles from the Dollar Store:

Then just wrapped like mad and hung them with the coordinating ribbon:

Be careful to make the overlaps a bit bigger, like the striped one on the left, otherwise you’ll use an insane amount of ribbon. Really. Ask me.

I think it’s better without the placemats, you?:

  

I mean, it’s not like there’s nothing else going on in the room. ;) I find taking away does more than adding:

For another adorable chair decor idea, check out Lindsay’s itty bitty monograms.

Can you believe Christmas is NEXT WEEK?? I’m not even close to being done shopping. The Christmas cards haven’t been written out. But the house is pretty and glowing and right now that is very, very good.  :)