This is the perfect year for a crafty, cost-effective Christmas, a fun way of cutting expenses when you may need funds for other things.
Hand-made or adapted Christmassy things can be just as gorgeous as those bought from the shops.
My top ten ideas revolve around what can be purchased cheaply, found in the garden or woods, or might already be lying around in your home. As a bonus, many are recycled or compostable, so will earn you a green credential or two.
1) The first is my favourite; a way of creating outdoor decorations for your garden and helping the wildlife through the winter at the same time – fat cakes! You might not find them appetising, but our feathered friends will, and they can look great dangling from your trees and shrubs.
You’ll need: wild bird feed, lard or suet, unsalted/unroasted peanuts, wild bird feed, raisins, oats, string (I used jute, as it’s compostable) and clean yoghurt pots or similar – bell-shaped are perfect. Using two parts of fat to the mixed-together dry ingredients, soften the fat (rather than letting it melt) and squidge everything together in a bowl, mixing thoroughly.
Bore holes in the yoghurt pot bases and pass the string through. Then pack the pot with the mixture, keeping the string running through the centre.
Refrigerate overnight, then you should be able to slide the cakes out of the pots ready to hang on trees or even balconies. This also works with half a coconut shell, foil pie cases, or, if you have them anyway, silicone food or candle moulds.
This idea came from writing A White Christmas on Winter Street, when Sky, who’s keen on nature and sustainability, is asked to decorate her trees for a Christmas Street competition and refuses to spend a load of dosh on buying ornaments that will only gather dust for the rest of the year.
2) Make your own Christmas tree. The trendy bare-tree ones can be replicated using a nicely shaped branch, wedged into a pot with pebbles/soil/sand, and decorated, either with traditional baubles or with your own ideas – perhaps bunches of nuts or shapes made from salt dough. If you’re handy enough, you could knit some!
Fallen branches are best, of course, or you might make selecting a branch part of your winter pruning. I have conifers that go crazy and so I snip off boughs at Christmas to become part of the decorations.
3) Put a big candle in a pretty glass bowl and surround it with glass beads, baubles or anything else pretty but not flammable.
4) Upturn clean, polished wine glasses over sprigs of holly, scrunches of ribbon or Christmas ornaments and add a candle/tealight on top of the base.
You can make lovely ‘ribbon’ for decoration by printing out sheet music and cutting it into strips. Glass + candle + almost anything can be made to look festive.
5) Christmas mug cakes in the microwave are a cheap and cheerful treat – and kids love making them, too. Use large, microwaveable mugs, greased.
Cream together 2 ½ tablespoons of softened, unsalted butter, a good tablespoon of light brown sugar and mix in 2 ½ tablespoons of self-raising flour, then a beaten egg and half a tablespoon of milk.
Layer this batter with 3 good tablespoons of mincemeat in the mug. Microwave for 1 ½ minutes on 800. Or you can double the ingredients to make two mugs and microwave them together.
6) Create a Christmas wreath out of things from the garden/woods. Create a circlet out of willow or hazel, or even clematis vine. Use the string (jute to make it compostable) to form small bunches of berried holly, spotted laurel or any other attractive winter foliage you can forage for.
Arrange the bunches attractively around the circlet and bind on with more jute string. Experiment with ribbon (make your own with paper or hessian) or forget the composting angle and add bunches of baubles.
7) Save your wine bottles! Attractive glass bottles make wonderful candle holders.
Or you can fill the bottles with ‘bottle lights’, strands of tiny lights that sparkle like fireflies from inside the glass. Brilliant on the festive dinner table or during a romantic, Christmassy evening.
8) Rather than buying expensive Christmas stockings, make your own. You can buy men’s footie socks from budget stores for a fraction of the price of even the cheapest ready-mades.
Before you begin, if you have any clothes ready to be thrown out but not good enough for the charity bag, strip off buttons, bows, sequins and beads, as these you can be sewn (or attached with fabric glue) onto the stockings.
You cannot overdecorate a Christmas stocking, so create fringes out of scrap fabric, use up bits of braid from the bottom of your sewing basket. Embroider names or initials or glue on gold card shapes.
Don’t forget to sew on a loop to hang the stocking up. For a fun touch when the stocking is full of gifts, cut antler shapes from an ordinary brown cardboard box and pop them in the top.
9) Decorate a plain hairband to turn it into Christmas party wear. A ribbon twined around the basic shape does a great cover-up job, and once secured forms a base to which you can glue or sew baubles, beads and shiny bows.
It’s easy to choose colours to co-ordinate with your favourite outfit, too. Or just go for gold, silver and red – can’t go wrong, can you?
10) If you buy a family tub of chocolates in pretty wrappings, don’t leave them in the plastic tub. Tip them into a glass vase or jar, and add a ribbon bow, maybe with shiny baubles mixed in.
If you have children, you may need to find a nice high shelf for this decoration, or it won’t last long...
Have fun!
- Sue Moorcroft is a Sunday Times bestselling author, her latest book A White Christmas on Winter Street is the perfect festive read, published by Avon Harper Collins and available now.
