My Christmas Tree Red.............and orange

We have a perfectly good tree, actually quite a beautiful one. Trouble is no one wants to put it up anymore. It's not that we are disinterested, lazy, or grouch, but it's too big, too heavy, too many days to fill, too many lights every year that don't work.  I am a believer in adjusting to life as it changes and so off I went and bought one of those mass-produced pre-lit fake trees to get us through a time-crunched year and you know what................it works, it works just fine. Just don't look too close at the branches.

For various reasons, we haven't put "the" tree up in two years so I forgot all about these handsome ornaments, my very favorite. Isn't that the fun part of decorating a tree, finding all the stuff you forgot about? I wish I could get more of these, especially since I dropped and shattered two of them today. 
This tree is much smaller so we didn't pull out all our ornaments, I am hoping there is another box of these dandy elephants and deer. I just adore their sparkly attire.

We obviously love dog ornaments. Forgot about these too.

Our Shin Tzu ornament. we all went "ahhhhh............" when this one came out.

I promise to put away my addictive iphone in the New Year for better photo clarity but right now it is working quick and easy. Is this a dog too? Or a wolf? A fox? Obviously, I should watch less HBO and more Animal Planet.

I thought I might change it up this year but you know what? 
I still really like this red and orange tree.
It will do just fine.

All photos by Sande Chase ~ A Gift Wrapped Life

Clean Up at the Pop Up Shop

I woke up at 6 am today. Actually it was 5 am. We didn't realize our mistake until about 9 am when my husband was preparing a bacon-and-egg breakfast, we totally forgot about last night's daylight savings time adjustment. While he cooked, served, and then washed up, I sat at the island and finished up some last minute inventory counts before the movers knock on my door. I told my husband that I had a bit of a "got-up-to-early" headaches, he said no, that would be those 3 strong drinks you had last night. I don't actually drink that much so I forgot all about those drinky headaches but I sure slept well. Yesterday, my housekeeper Alana, her daughter Monica and I listened to a energetic play list while cleaning up the temporary retail "Pop Up" shop I told you about last week and I thought I would share some of the "before" photos. By the end of today it will be filled with merchandise, and then the race will be on to unpack and price inventory, advertise, and do all the display before I open the doors this coming Saturday. Oh, and I have a wireless Interac transaction device to learn tomorrow. This should be interesting. I will post all the Pop-Up information early this week on this blog for local readers.

I got kind of lucky in finding a temporary space that is perfect for this type of limited sale, especially considering it is located 3 minutes from my house. Back where you see the name of the former store occupant is a workspace counter where I will set up for a couple workshop events. My website business and blog (eg. latent gift wrapping ability) are better know outside my home city of Windsor, Ontario (which is typical for websites) so locals will be wondering why a designer is suddenly offering gift wrap workshops. So though there is room for about 50 chairs, I may only need a few and those would be used by my friends and any one else I can convince to attend. If I can organize one more step during this month-long marathon, I may video the workshop and share it on the blog. Some gift wrap techniques are better seen than written about and some readers have suggested this idea more than a few times. Which means you would have the pleasure of hearing this Canadian say "eh" at the end of every sentence. It's true, we do that quite a bit.

Remember these orange crushed-velvet poinsettias I used last Christmas? I have quite a few left so they are going to cover the store Christmas tree. We spent last Christmas in snow-covered Oklahoma and I never did get to see this orange and red colour scheme on my tree as I had envisioned. Then, of course they will be on sale too, unless of course I really like the final effect. If so, then the tree and I will walk home when all is said and done.

All photos by Sande Chase ~ A Gift Wrapped Life