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How To Turn Your Summer Hanging Baskets Into Beautiful Christmas Decorations

Wednesday, January 13, 2016 15:06

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Need a new and refreshing way to spruce up your Christmas decorations without costing you any money at all? If you have an outdoor hanging basket it is easy to do!

We used the same basket that held our ornamental peppers in the summer to complete this project

This year we transformed our hanging baskets that are normally filled with ornamental peppers or impatiens into a beautiful Christmas decoration and we didn’t spend a dime, and it all started with a trip to visit Jim’s mom.

As we were sitting at the kitchen table enjoying a cup of coffee we peered out of the window and looked at the enormous pine trees in the back yard. We then began to discuss how nice it would be to use the fresh pine to decorate for Christmas. So in a matter of minutes, Jim and Nolan trekked outside on that cold and frosty morning and began to snip some branches to bring home with us.

Pine branches and pine cones from Grandma's house — Pine branches and pine cones from Grandma’s house

‘Luckily’ Jim is tall and could reach the ‘low’ branches, that aren’t so low any more, but his luck turned south quickly. The dew from the morning fog had frozen on top of the branches and every time Jim went to grab a branch to cut, he was sprayed with the melting frost – right down the back of his neck and arms. He never complained a bit, even when I asked him to go back out one last time to gather some pine cones.

Trim off the branches that you don't need. — Trim off the branches that you don’t need.

Place branches inside the basket - mounding them up in the center. — Place branches inside the basket – mounding them up in the center.

After all the branches are assembled, now is the time to add lights.

Add bulbs and any other decorations that you want to use.

We ended up with a large trash bag full of pine branches to take home with us and a plastic grocery bag full of gorgeous pine cones to use for decorations. Once we got home, I quickly took the hanging baskets off the shelf in the garage and began to create our homemade Christmas basket.

It was very easy to put together:

Remove any remaining dirt in the bottom of your coco liner – keeping the liner intact.
Cut various size branches of pine and place in your liner, mounding up the center and leaving a few branches to overhang on the edges.
Add 4-5 pine cones in various areas – they are good way to use up space in open areas of your pine nest.
If you are adding lights to your project, now is the time to do it. We used battery operated lights that we had used as part of a Halloween decoration.
Add Christmas bulbs to your liking. We used 10 bulbs.
We then added some sticks of berries that we had in our Christmas decoration box for a final touch.

And there it was, in a matter of minutes we had a new Christmas decoration made from items we already had or that we got for free!

Happy Decorating!

Jim and Mary

Our hanging basket even looks good during the day!

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