Ten-minute Christmas decoration

It all started with two big red buckets of leftover small evergreen branches from my porch railing project. I've had them saved in the shed for the last week and a half, and this morning I brought one inside to get to work on a simple Christmas decorating project I've had in mind for a while.

I have this great big glass cylinder that my mom gave me for Christmas last year, and I knew I wanted to use it somehow with the evergreens. I wanted a pretty stout candle to go inside it, as opposed to the really tall taper that came with it, so I chose another glass piece out of my collection that would work as a stand when used upside-down.

I went down and got into my candle box for the red pillar candle, and the whole deal was off to a good start.

With my pruning shears I used for flowers all summer, I started clipping apart some of the bigger branches of evergreen and layering them in the cylinder around the upside-down glass piece.

These are some of the Christmas balls I had left over after getting the tree trimmed. The discount store Ross is a great place to get cheap and large amounts of Christmas decorations, and that's where the mini red balls came from. The silver ones came with the cylinder, and the glass ones in the box my mom also gave me. I ended up not using them for this project, because they were too big to fit.

And tada! This is what I ended up with after just a few minutes of clipping, arranging and dropping in the ornaments here and there.

Link felt the need to take some credit for the new dining room table centerpiece.

The nice thing about the decorations I put together for my house is that I can pack them up and take them to the office for our Roundup Christmas party, which is coming up in a couple weeks. Or rather, a week! This month will be gone before I know it....

Last year I made the glitter birds for the Roundup Christmas party, and they're still around in the Christmas decoration boxes somewhere...

I saw this idea on an online blog, I apologize I lost track of the source, and I still have plenty of little evergreen branches left over in the red tubs, so I'm thinking I'll try to find them and make some little pine arrangements and decorate them with the glitter birds and some more small Christmas balls that I still have left.