Crazy Christmas Tree!

Hola darlings!

I am in a mad-dash countdown to tomorrow morning when the investment club ladies and two special young lady visitors will be here to celebrate our club gift exchange and talk about our Christmas plans.  My house must be ready!

It seemed like a good idea at the time...  Sputnik "natural" feathered tree,
waiting for ornaments (don't think they'll help much).

I would like to say that I've been working like a whirlwind every night after work for a week to whip this house into holiday company shape, but that would not be the truth.  The truth is, these days when I get home from the office I'm so pooped out it is sometimes all I can do to stay up until 10 p.m., and not a whole lot gets done.

However, I have been making little pushes here and there since last weekend.  And I've made progress.  Except for the mini gallery wall in my bedroom (I will tackle that tonight while the Wisconsin Badgers football game is on) and figuring out how to tie up and drape the bed curtains that I ironed and hung up this morning (they are sheer voile tie-ons, and very pretty), the mistress bedroom is almost ready!

I do love the look of those long faux feathers and the glitzy boas.
Probably not together, though.  Oh well. 

And the den/library has furniture in place, too!  I got up at 5:20 a.m. every day through yesterday this week and heaved and shoved the pieces around until I was more or less satisfied.  (Today I slept in until 6:30 a.m.)  There's too much furniture in too little of a space but the one item I'd like to remove (the cedar chest) is too heavy for me to carry down to the wreck room on my own.  There is also a little file cabinet in a pale "alder" finish that doesn't go with the rest of the furniture.  I can handle removing that to free up a few square feet of space.  The room is otherwise a mess, with boxes half-unpacked and stuff scattered all over the place.  I'll have to stash things in the wreck room for the time being; no time for more unboxing today.

Oh my!  Those "feather" branches look so -- hmmm.  But they're making me smile.
If I had trees in my backyard like I used to have at the former Maison Newton,
I'd be raiding the yard right now for branches, doing some emergency
spray-painting and adding some au naturel touches

I've got Christmas touches ready to go into the bathroom -- just need to do it's weekly cleaning first.

The kitchen and dinette area are also wrecks!  I'll tackle these spaces last. Where did I put my cardinal prints?  I found my cardinal plates!  And my cardinal snow globe!  And my cardinal Christmas tree!  The "winter" curtains are up.  I need to iron the red table cloth, clear all the clutter, vacuum and mop the floor and arrange the Christmas accessories.  Must stop blogging and start moving again!

No ornaments on the tree yet.  Come on, Jan, old gal, you can do this!

Most of the boxes of Christmas ornaments and decorations hauled up from the basement storage area are marching back down the stairs, as I'm keeping the decorations on the tree to as little as I can get away so it looks "clothed" and not bare naked.  And where on earth is my white curling ribbon hiding?  I've been looking for it off and on since 8:30 a.m. and can't find it anywhere.  I want to try and use it to tie up/anchor the bed curtains.  And wondering if I should pull out the red satin pillow covers for a Christmas-y touch in the mistress bedroom...

The living room and, most importantly, the Christmas tree, still need to be finished!  While I was keeping one eye on "Grimm" on t.v. last night, I was working on the tree.  Well, it looks more like Sputnik (you know -- the original Russian satellite that started the space race between the former Soviet Union and the United States in 1958)  than the beautiful feathered  glitzy and yet rustic creation I'd envisioned.  I think my decorating vision is developing cataracts.  But I don't have the time or energy to change it now, so I'm just going to have to work with what it is.

The ornaments go on today, ready or not!  For a few quiet moments this morning, while I was sipping my coffee before sunrise, I thought about not putting any ornaments on the tree at all, just leaving it as it is.  Ummmm, no.  Back to work here...