Pretty Poinsettias

Around here, we like to deck the halls for Christmas in a leisurely manner. It usually gets done by the middle of December.  However, next Saturday night Hubby Tony and I are hosting dinner for the members of a group he's involved in.  We decided it would be a good idea to have the house looking festive for the event.

I put the lights on the deck before the weather turned cold.  On Thanksgiving Day I plugged them into the timer that turns them on at dusk and off six hours later.   Before Son Donald left to go back to college last night his dad pressed him into service to help with the outside lights (on Saturday) and the tree lights yesterday. Tony and I finished the rest of the tree, and did some of the house decorating before my back decided it was time to call it a day.

Today I tackled the rest of the job, removing the regular items in the family room and above the kitchen cabinets and replacing them with holiday decorations.  I was patting myself on the back for finishing until I saw the large plastic bag setting on the floor in the dining room.  The bag held the 20 silk poinsettia bushes (laying flat, flowers outward, with their stems covered with swaths of plaid material) that go on the plant shelf above the front door in our two story foyer. For the past few years Donald's taken care of the task. But Donald was gone, so the job fell back to me.

I carried the eight foot tall stepladder up from the basement and opened it next to the front door, then grabbed a handful of bushes, climbed up to the next-to-top step of the ladder, and laid the plants out on the shelf. I had to move the ladder multiple times, then repeat the process with the material.

To see if things were arranged correctly I had to climb up the steps to the second floor.  It took a couple of tries, but I finally got it right.

The result