Christmas By Candlelight

Sort of at the last minute,  my daughter decided she wanted  to have a  Windswept Farm   Christmas party  this coming Thursday night  for our boarders and  people she knows from other barns  so I put the packing on hold to help her pull some things together for the party. 

Several days ago, it occurred to me it would be nice if we had  some type of decoration to place on  the  tables where the food will be set up.  We’re trying to make things look festive but most of my Christmas decorations are  packed  for the upcoming move to the house in Hooterville.  Since  I didn’t  have anything readily accessible from my Christmas decoration stash, I was going to have to buy something.  But what?    “It”  needed to be simple and cheap, and certainly not too fancy because we’ll be partying outside around the barns.   

I turned to Blogland for inspiration and of course, I was not let down!  On several blogs I saw variations of canning jar votive candles and thought I’d try making my own.

Seriously, the hardest part of this  project was finding the darn jelly jars!  I went to two Wal-Marts, Target, Big Lots and K-Mart without any luck.  Who would have thought canning jars would be so hard to find?!  Finally, a K-Mart sales associate suggested I try the grocery store across the street. 

Score!

Then I was off to Michael’s and JoAnn craft stores  for a few supplies to decorate the jars.  This  also  proved to be  a bit of a challenge because the Christmas stuff was pretty well picked over.  (Just a little more than a week before Christmas, what did I expect?) 

I decided on one little bag of red bead-like balls and one stem of faux Christmas greenery that had multiple sprigs and a few miniature pine cones on it.  I already had a ball of  jute twine at home.

For each jar, I pulled off one little sprig of greenery from the main stem and attached it to the neck of the jar with my glue gun.  I wrapped the jute around the neck of the jar two or three times, tied a knot in the front, and  untwisted the jute ends to make them “fluffier.”  Then I attached the red balls and pine cones in the area of the knot with hot glue.  I varied the placement of the red balls and pinecones so no two jars were identical.   Similar.  But not the same.

To simulate snow, I poured  about 1 inch of  Epson salts into each jar and set a white votive candle down into it, making sure the candle was placed  well below the rim of the jar so the candle flame could not make contact with any of the jute twine I had fluffed. 

I decorated a dozen  jelly jars  but they were so quick, easy and inexpensive to make, I think I’m going to go back and get 12 more.

If 12 jars of flickering candlelight are good, 24 jars should be even better!