Rustic Homemade Christmas Tree: Homemade Dried Fruit Slice Christmas Ornaments

When I was in 3rd grade, my class was studying Colonial America for history at Christmas time. Though in reality in colonial America Christmas was not exactly the major holiday it is today (in fact it was often outright banned in Puritan areas), we celebrated Christmas "colonial" style.

Rustic Homemade Christmas Tree: Baking Soda and Cornstarch Dough Snowflake Ornaments

The minute I got a good batch of this dough whipped up, I knew the first thing I wanted to try: snowflakes. Perhaps it is related to the paper snowflake obsession, maybe it is the fact that I was born during a snowstorm in Seattle (where it doesn't snow all that much), or maybe it is just because I am weird, but I love decorating with snowflakes. They are just so pretty. But first, we must make the dough.

Rustic Homemade Christmas Tree

Decorating the tree in my childhood consisted of playing the entire family collection of Christmas music (starting with Mannheim Steamroller and skipping that weird music box CD that one of our realtors gave us once) and hanging the large collection of ornaments on our artificial tree that went through a basement flood before it was ever used the first time. We would pile the ornaments on the parts that were easiest to reach until my Dad would point out that the tree was leaning into the room, and then we would all get behind the tree and put a bunch more on there until the lean was more inwards than outwards. The logic was if it fell over, it would hit the wall as opposed to a person.

Harold and the Purple Crayon Family Halloween Costumes

We were Harold and the Purple Crayon this year for Halloween. More specifically, David was Harold, Peter was the Purple Crayon, and Patrick and I were 2 of the pages. We got the idea from this site. For more specifics on our individual costumes, see the links below.