Une Envie de Sel

Having a toddler means that everything else in life takes a lower priority. This means that things don't get done with the same, shall we say, punctuality as they did previously. And this is fine. This is as it should be.
So it is that our holiday decorations are getting done at a much more leisurely pace this year. It's also a year for experimentation. How, after all, do you decorate a house in which there lives a tiny, manic, paper-eating hurricane of a 15-month-old? Interesting question.
Last year, our first Christmas in this house, we decided to take advantage of the lovely old windows of the "mud room" and decorate the front of the house with paper snowflakes, lanterns and vintage glass ornaments. It was so beautiful that we're make a tradition of it. This is the advantage of having a hundred-year-old house. Well....at least half of it is 100 years old. The other half is only five years old, turning our tiny, narrow, one-level Denver Square into the bright, open, loftlike space that we fell in love with at first sight.
After much deliberation, it finally dawned on us that the mud room was, in fact, our solution. Separated by a heavy door from the main house, with windows much too high for tiny fingers to reach, it's the perfect showcase for our 1960s glass ornaments. It is also ju-u-ust wide enough to hold a modest-sized but full fir tree, visible from the outside when you come up the walk, and from the inside through the livingroom window, but inacessible to our tiny Jiangsu hurricane unless we escort her there.
Q and I cut the paper snowflakes together this year (paper is her favorite toy, snack, and teething utensil, and she was happy as a clam in a big, snowy pile of clippings!) and the deep freeze came just in time to frost over the mudroom windows, and turn the front of the house into a fairyland.
Phase 1: complete!
Next, on to the tree...