Decorating the Christmas tree 2020 -

I love decorating the Christmas tree. This year I decided to shout myself a new Christmas tree. My old one hard to started to fall apart and some of the branches wouldn’t stay up on their own. Given that we had not spent much money this year on travel I decided my new Christmas tree would be from Balsam Hill. This was super exciting for me because I have wanted one for ages.

I decided on their pre lit 210cm Monterey Pine. I chose this one for several reasons.

It was in their most realistic list.
We did not want the hassle of putting lights on the tree.
This one had a smaller circumference compared to some of the others. Our house is not huge and I really only have one space to put the tree and luckily this one would fit. I was surprised by how wide some of the others were! I did also note that the heights varied depending on the species of tree you chose.
The price of this one was also a bit cheaper than some of the others. I did manage to get mine during their sale which was great.

The picture above shows the tree after I unpacked it and fluffed it for a little while. I wasn’t overly happy with it at that point but didn’t think too much about it until I started to decorate.

Hints for putting the tree up

Now I am usually pretty good at decorating the Christmas tree and can get it done easily with the family as is our tradition. This time it was not the case. I am shocked that having a different tree (after many many years) could affect the way I decorated so much!!! I ended up pulling the decorations off twice before I worked out what was wrong. This never happens 🥴. At this point I decided to have a look at the Balsam Hills website and I read that the first time you fluff your tree it will take you about 2hrs. I did it in 15 minutes 😱.

It also said you should look at their pictures of your tree to see how the tree should look. This was a game changer. I pulled the tree apart so that I could fluff each section without the other layers being in the way. There are bits of greenery at the back of the branch that needs to be unravelled and stood up to fill in the gaps. The branches of the Monterey Pine in their picture actually face up, not down as I had it. This made a massive difference because all my ornaments kept slipping off!!! The difference in the look of the tree was huge. Moral of the story – watch the video before decorating your tree!!!!

Decorating the Christmas tree 2020

So once I had the tree correctly put together the decorating was so much easier. I will say though that I ended up using wire hooks for all my decorations instead of the ribbons that were on a lot of them. I found the the ribbons were not attaching the decorations well enough and some were still sliding off.

I started with the biggest baubles I had. I did have to go out and purchase some more things for the tree as I hadn’t realised how much bigger it was than my last one and I just didn’t have enough. The smaller baubles I had also looked a little ridiculous on the tree too.

I added in ribbon, flowers and some beautiful white decorations I found in Europe. In the end of I was so happy with how it came out. I think in the future I will probably use most of the white, cream and gold decorations as my base and add in my feature colour with a few new ornaments. This year my feature colour for the tree was black. It was not an easy colour because I found it difficult to find ornaments. By adding some black velvet bows though I think it came out really good. I also added the black by using wrapping paper and some other decorations in the room.

The last part of decorating the Christmas tree was faux gifts wrapped in co-ordinating colours for under the tree.

I also added a few extra Christmas vignettes in the lounge room.

Entry decorations

I used a garland I purchased from Kmart on my entry table. To bulk the garland out I added another cheaper garland that I already had. It also came from Kmart and they still stock it. In order to add a little more interest to the I used a timber ball garland I found at Pillow Talk. I found some picks at Kmart that matched the wreath so I added a few of those into the garland at the corners. To attach the garland to my table I used Command hooks. I also used florists wire to attach the picks to the garland. I show a close up photo of this below.

Kmart had some hessian ribbon that had lights attached so I draped that over the mirror. I used a paper Christmas tree and ball that were in my collection for decoration. The Christmas sign I purchased at The Vintage & Country Brocante from Paint Me White.