Tuesday's tips: Inexpensive holiday decorating traditions

My kids love decorating for the seasons. There are color appropriate bins in our basement for each celebration: black and orange for Halloween, pink for Valentines, and green and red for Christmas. Everything is wrapped up tight, ready to move in a moment’s notice.

Each year the stash keeps growing and growing. I get distracted by all the pretty things in the store windows and displays. It’s starting to feel like an addiction, actually. Seriously, how many ceramic candle holders shaped like Santa does one household need? You know it is bad when the first place you dart to in the Salvation Army Surplus Store is the housewares and decorating section in search of more seasonal treasures. The most ridiculous part of my obsession is the fact that the kids actually prefer the more homemade decorations.

Out of all our sparkly ornamentation, the top two favorites are paper snowflakes and cards stapled to ribbon hanging on our inside doors. I don’t really like clutter or stacks of paper, so a few years ago I decided to collect all of our greeting cards and display them like art on a closet door in our foyer.  We outgrow the closet door, and by the end of the season most all of our inside doors are adorned with smiling holiday faces. It has become such a favorite tradition that my girls have started collecting ribbon for other holidays or celebrations to hang cards for birthdays, valentine’s, etc.

Paper snowflakes have evolved over the years from squared-off unrecognizable blobs of cut-up paper to detailed and well-thought out works of art. Who would have thought it would all boil down to the folding? (Thank you, Pinterest!) We hang them from door frames and lights or simply tape them to our windows. It’s amazing how entertaining a stack of white computer paper and a couple pair of scissors can become.

One of these days, I will learn.