Travel Theme Christmas Tree
Happy Christmas Eve!
Each year my mom and I do themed Christmas trees. Sometimes it’s based on colors, other times sports teams, and occasionally it is completely random themes we come up with. This year Jon and I decided to do a travel themed tree to celebrate our love of traveling and highlight all of the places we’ve been!
The only problem was last year we decided to buy new tree lights on sale after Christmas… But we didn’t buy enough so when we ordered more early this December, the shipment got delayed and our schedule was thrown off. I finally hung the first ornament on December 22nd and quickly found that I did not have enough ornaments for this huge tree, so I had to get creative and make my own ornaments.
Luckily for me, my mom was 10 steps ahead of me had saved a ton of maps from newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets she’d collected throughout the year, mostly of Washington-state.
Since this tree was all about where we’ve been, I traced circles around places where we’ve been, where we live, or where our families live. Each circle represents a place that’s special to us, including a small circle with Cuba on it that I attached to a diamond ring to represent our engagement.
I had to make these circle quickly, since there were only 3 days until Christmas, so I found a garland with pre-made circles and took that apart (I used this one), traced the circles onto the maps, and then used a spray adhesive to glue them together. The next morning I punched a small hole with a thumbtack and threaded string ties through them.
We also added other ornaments that represented our travels, such as airplanes, cameras, suitcases, and landmarks from the places we’ve traveled to. This ornament in particular is really special because my mom had her coworker sketch out the world on a blue ornament for us. So cool!
Since we have a kitten who’s getting into EVERYTHING we also hung maps from the bottom of the tree – those are unbreakable and not shiny so he left them alone!
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I wanted to tie the theme into the wrapping paper as well, so I used a combination of brown paper and leftover maps to wrap gifts! I also made my own tags out of leftover map sections. I love how it all came together, even though it was so last minute! I definitely think that we will repeat this theme in a few years once, we’ve added a few more travel destinations to our belts!
