Decorating The Home For Xmas Can Be Grand Fun

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 16, Issue 36, 22 December 1950, Page 5

Decorating The Home For Xmas Can Be Grand Fun

For a real family Christmas the decorations arid trimmings you can contrive yourself are far more festal and jolly than anything that can be bought. They are fun to make and the materials cost next to nothing—coloured paper, including crepe and tissue, cellophane, the wrappings from toffees and sweets, silver cake mats, even the tinfoil from bottles, and, of course, cotton wool. With treasures such as these, a pair of scissors and some paste, an enormous variety of glittering and colourful objects can be made in a short time.

And nothing . will make Christmas more real to the children, especially if they are allowed to help. Above all, try your hand at a Christmas tree dressed with homemade trimmings. Rolls of tinfoil ribbon, which makes glittering corkscrew festoons, can be bought, and paper-chains are also effective. Cut out paper birds and butterflies made from cellophane (wrappings from sweets can be used). A miniature tree can be cut from two pieces of card, slotted one into the other and set into a cork or scrap of wood as a base. Cotton wool can be added. For a Father Christmas make a tube about 6in high out of card, cover with scarlet crepe paper and in the top, for the head, fix a screw of paper covering a ball of cotton wool. The cloak and hood are then folded, using crepe paper doubled, and fixed with glue, after which cotton wool trimming and beard ate added.

Then what about a tiny creche? Once they were almost as regular a feature of a family Christmas as the tree itself, and children love them. A picture frame, of any size from about 15in to 24in long, can be used to make a proscenium. It can be covered with coloured paper and given a surround of pine branches. The back and sides of this little stage are made in the traditional way from crumpled brown paper, which gives exactly the appearance of the rocky walls of a grotto, and the floor is covered with straw or dry grass. For the figures use tiny dolls suitably dressed, or cut-outs from magazines pasted on to stiff cardboard, or the figures can be made from any scraps of material or coloured paper, over a rough skeleton of wire. For the heads, a little ball of fabric or paper is all that is needed. To light the scene, use a hand torch or a miniature 15-watt lamp covered with red cellophane, concealed behind the picture frame.