We're on the quarter system at UC Davis, so there are only 10 weeks of classes followed by a week of finals. It's actually a pretty great system (for me, at least — I burn out right as finals are ending), but the downside is that there's only a week between Thanksgiving break and finals week, and then everyone goes home as quickly as they can to start enjoying their break. This gives very little time to celebrate Christmas, and Christmas is my favorite holiday.
Since the roommates and I have so little time in Davis in December, it doesn't make sense to spend a bunch of money and buy a real Christmas tree. I found a great idea online to make a "tree" from a tomato cage, so I grabbed a nasty one from my parents while I was home over break. I wiped as much of the dirt and rust off as I could, then spray-painted it.
I let it dry for a few hours. You have to look up-close to see the shininess, but it does cover up a lot of the rust and dirt I wasn't able to scrub away.
Once the paint was dry, I took it inside and wired together the top spires to create a cone. Starting at the top, I wrapped a strand of Christmas lights around, securing it to the tomato cage at intervals with twist ties. Then I added some ornaments, et voil
à, a tree!
One of my housemates and I went to the store to get food and picked up an angel ornament as well, which I wired to the top of the "tree" in a not-so-elegant fashion.
It hasn't fallen down yet, though, so I suppose my haphazard job worked well. Hooray!
The bottom looked a little empty, so I took some silk brocade we weren't using in our apartment and wrapped it around the bottom. With some presents around it, our "tree" looked quite festive!
Even if it doesn't have that enchanting smell of a pine tree, it does add a little bit of Christmas magic to our apartment. I spent $5 on the spray paint and $2.50 on the lights — much better than $40 for a real tree! My roommates and I swapped presents after finals, and it was really fun to pull the presents out from under/next to the tree.
Plus, come April one lucky tomato plant is going to have the prettiest cage in my parents' garden.
No comments:
Post a Comment