Late Greetings and Chritmas Post

First of all, I hope everyone had a super merry Christmas and big bang new year celebration!

 

After 10 years,  I am finally able to sneak in and post something here on my abandoned blog.  Need I elaborate more on how tough it is to balance time between taking care of a high-spirited 2.75 toddler, a full-time day job, being a wife to a doting husband and being a homemaker?  I didn't think so :)
 

We celebrated Christmas with the family here in Spain - unlike Christmas of 2011 where we were able to go home to my motherland and had the chance to celebrate Christmas like there's no tomorrow.

 

Christmas celebration here in Spain is nothing like how it is celebrated in the Philippines.  Christmas in the Philippines is GRAND! The Christmas spirit starts to tickle everyone's heart by the start of September and goes on until a couple more weeks after new year.

 

We still get to enjoy the Christmas here especially that this is the time that Little Spanish Pinay gets to understand a little bit more of about the Christmas concept.  She enjoyed the gift-giving (more on gift-receiving on her side) of course.  She has also started understanding about Santa Claus and she did wait for his arrival with much anticipation.  We  had our noche buena (dinner on 24th) at my sister-in-law's in-laws together with my in-laws.  That's right, in-laws are typed 3 times.  4 actually.

 

The poor little girl slept at about 2 am.  We did prepare Santa's milk and cookies before she went to bed but sharing is not yet one of her established values as she only wanted to put ONE cookie for Santa... she even chose the cookie she likes the least.  At least we were able to convince her to add another one more cookies as Santa might be very hungry when he arrives. You gotta laugh at this little mischief.  Note: Sharing is important for us but we don't force it.

So the following day, she was all giddy when we finally told her that today is the day! We have to check if Santa came and left something for her.

 

 

She was definitely happy with Santa's gifts. I'm glad we didn't go overboard with the gifts.  After all, there's still Three Kings where kids (and kids-alike) receive more gifts.

 

 

 

After gift opening and a good lot of time to play, we headed over to my in-laws to have lunch with them.  Overall, Christmas celebration here in Spain is quite simple but quite significant, nonetheless.  It was well spent with the love ones.  And thanks to technology, we are also somehow able to celebrate Christmas with the family oceans away through video calls.

 



Christmas DIYs and Recycling

Since I've been really committed to being green (whenever I can) and frugal,  I have sworn to not buy new Christmas decors nor buy gift wrappers.  I sworn to use our old Christmas decors and if they are not enough, take out my magic DIYer wand.  I sworn to use papers I already have for gift wrappers and make them look Christmas-y so then I won't have to buy gift wrappers. Sounds extreme?  A bit.  It's actually quite hard to resist the temptation of buying those super lovely Christmas decors and ornaments from the store whenever I see them... but I am so doing it! **patting my back**

I'll probably won't be able to complete decorating the house but with the close-to-none extra time I have, I'm just doing what I can.  And I am quite pleased about the whole effort so here I am showing 'em off.  You are warned:  there'll be stars everywhere!

Entrance hall.  Remember the wall decor I created using pistachio shells?  There they still are.  The paper snowflakes on the side are just paper cut outs using normal printing papers.  The mistletoes on the yellow and green vases are from the tree.  The stars are from a kraft and cereal boxes.

The plant/tree that I always thought to be mistletoe are just taken from the nearby park.  Thank you my fellow mommy bloggers and twitter buddies, I have learned something new..  It's not mistletoe, Spanish Pinay.  It's Holly!

Some more 3D stars this time out of magazine covers

and another set of 3D stars from cereal boxes

Yet another star from cereal box.  Candle (ok, with this one, I couldn't resist... I bought it. But for 2 euros, it was begging to climb my shopping cart and so I gave in). Decorative sand = expired baby cereal mix and glitters! That's a winner I tell you.  The gold small balls are from a broken old Christmas decors and finally, the pine cone I picked from one of our walks in the mountains one summer day

Parol (Fillipino Christmas lantern).  This was a necessity for me to make. 

Blame it on homesickness.  This parol is made out of barbeque sticks.  The cellophanes are store brought while the white tissue papers are recycled from the pictures frames I bought ages ago.  Stores would usually wrap fragile items with these type of paper tissues.  Yes, I also keep those. Holler if anyone wants a tutorial!

Gifts wrapped so far:  The brown papers from the dining chairs packaging we ordered online months ago.  The different ornaments used are:  magazine papers, some colored craft papers I already have, yarn, cupcake papers from a tin can of danish cookies and of course, glitters! I certainly think glitters is made for Christmas!

  

 I'll probably update this post if I am able to add some more Christmas decors at home for now, that's all the humble abode got.   I still need a Christmas wreath for the door.  Spell DIY and RECYCLE!

Disclaimer:  Don't be fooled by the neat pictures... the house mess is kicked off the camera radar ;-)