The Little Holiday Tree That Could.

Our Chez is still dressed to its' holiday nines. A combination of sheer laziness and THE POLAR VORTEX, i.e. it is too damn cold. Although at this point, what we have up are outside lights on one tree, two inside trees and plastic bins of "stuff", like ornaments, decor, etc. that just need to be taken to the basement. It just all seems like a lot (when really, it's not). 

#FirstWorldProblems <cubed>

My favorite new thing this year was a hack I discovered at Home Depot in the fall. Way before any normal person would think of decorating, but clearly well into what retail establishments felt was OK to have. I have since found out that Pinterest was all up in this idea ages ago, but since I do not Pinterest (or pin, as is the preferred nomenclature), I thought it was totally brilliant and totes new. 

Enter the Little Holiday Tree That Could. 

You take one metal tomato cage, as many non-LED string lights as you have, and twist ties. 

For extra oomph, you could add other sparking things or maybe some spray paint if your tomato cage is kinda grody. 

1. Start with the tomato cage upside down, like below.

2. Plug in the strings of lights to make sure they actually work. This is tremendously helpful before you install them. I only had three strings of white lights. I suppose if you a creative type it wouldn't bother you to mix white lights and the multi-colored strings, but I just can't roll like that. 

3. I used twist ties to keep the ends in place or in odd places where I felt the lights were being droopy. The next two photos, for instance, is the first twist tie I used to have a leader to plug in, while still holding the string to the cage. 

Note: I felt super SMRT for figuring this step out first, instead of getting to the end and realizing I hadn't left any room to actually plug the little tree in. 

4. Essentially, keep wrapping the string of lights around until you reach the end of one string, then plug in the next and just keep going. 

5. We had an extra tree topper so I decided to make it look even more like a tree by adding a strong rubber band at the top to bring the three points together and then using twist ties to hold the tree topper in place. 

Side note: could have used at least 2 more strings of white lights but seemed silly to go buy more, when I was basically just trying to use them up, since I was too lazy to recycle them in the first place. It's called Upcycling. It's cool. 

And VOILA! Here is the finished product installed on our front porch with Gayla Peevey and John Rox. 

All sarcasm aside, it was a really easy project to do, and added a little bit more sparkle to the front of our home. It would also be a very easy thing to dismantle, so one can use the tomato cage again in the spring, and put back together when the holidays roll back around in 11 months. 

Also, fairly safe so if little hands wished to help, easy to manage with them too. 

Did you have any easy and/or hacked projects 

that you put together for the holidays? 

(Share them now so that I have time to prepare by November!) :)