For years I’ve been wanting to make an arrangement of branches and hang Christmas ornaments on it instead of a huge tree. I like the idea of simplifying things (no more needles to vacuum daily, yay!), being frugal (we’ll save $80 by not buying a fancy live tree) and being creative with materials gathered from outside instead of just doing the same old thing every year because it’s “tradition”. My husband is much more sentimental than me and he’s been reluctant to let go of having a real tree, but this year we’re compromising. We’ll have my branch tree and we’ll make a point of taking a hike somewhere where we’ll see lots of evergreen trees and we can also take walks in the neighborhood to admire other people’s trees.

My son happened to bring home some branches from a neighbor’s house yesterday. When I told him my idea, he was so excited about “making the Christmas tree” but was concerned that Santa wouldn’t see it. I promised we’d move it beside the fireplace on Christmas Eve! Today we finally had time to work on it. I used an elastic band to hold the branches together. A few scoops of the 10lb bag of black beans I’d bought recently (I went a little wild with bulk food buying!) hid the bottoms of the branches.

I was thinking it looked a bit bare, but when I checked my email today I saw a note from Liz of Cici Art Factory about her free printable advent calendar. Perfect! It took only about 10 minutes to print, cut, fold and clip each numbered tag to the branch tree. I love how each tag has a fun (or funny!) family activity to do. I think my kids will get a kick out of it! They were already asking how many days until December 1st when we’ll open the first surprise.

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