The Parnassus Civic League Welcome to Historic Parnassus

Kudos to Donna Bruni for her work on the 2007 luminary sale! Mrs. Bruni has offered to organize the sale again this year. I am going to confirm the specific details of this year's sale and update this post later. In the meantime, here's a few simple Christmas decorations that I and Jonathan have done in years past when we were short on time and / or money. Please click on "read more."

I'm going to begin with a little story. Last Christmas, Jonathan and I took great pleasure in setting the luminaries in front of our house on Christmas Eve. Their Victorian beauty provided the perfect theme for our 1890's era home.

But here's the thing: we live in a fixer-upper. We have spells when we spend several weekends in a row working on the house, and then we get burned out, and then after several weeks or months we pick up where we left off, and repeat the cycle. In January 2007, we moved all of our living room furniture into our dining room and sealed off the living room with plastic so that we could renovate that room. By December 2007, all of our living room furniture was still in our dining room and our living room was a mess of partially scraped walls and partially scraped woodwork. Jonathan and I were still painting the room the weekend before Christmas, and Jonathan moved the furniture back into the room on December 23.

In the midst of this confusion, we didn't have enough time to go out and get a live Christmas tree or to do much decorating at all for Christmas. I did have a two-foot fake tree from my years as a single girl. While I was at work, Jonathan set this tree on our dining room table and decorated it with the Christmas ornaments I had that had been on my grandmother's tree. We discovered that the Victorians commonly had a small decorated tree on their tables at Christmas.

We were also happy to set up Mrs. Bruni's luminaries in front of our house on Christmas Eve.

The year before, in 2006, we had a live Christmas tree but we either ran out of time or money or both to decorate our porch. The tree that we had selected ended up being a little bit too big to set up inside our house, so Jonathan cut off a few inches at the bottom. We tied the extra branches down to the railing and columns of our porch for a quick old-fashioned décor.

Finally, when I was a single girl living on my own, I used to pop (regular unbuttered) popcorn, and thread the popcorn together to make inexpensive popcorn strings.

Do you have any quick and easy decorating tips?