It's Not Holiday Season Without Hot Glue And Salt

What, you don't look forward to Christmas by celebrating with hot glue and salt? I suppose you don't have a Festivus pole either. (Sorry, non-Seinfeld fans. You won't get the joke.)

I have started to get some Christmasy things together as Thanksgiving is ONE WEEK AWAY and you know what that means don't you? It means that my 24 hour days which are already flying by much too fast will now hit warp speed. Hence the need for creating a few things before I've even overeaten, bloated myself, gained 253 pounds dined on turkey, stuffing, and many varieties of pie.

While combing other people's blogrolls, I came across a lovely idea from Melissa at 320 Sycamore. She's full of creative ideas, but this one was right up my alley. (You all know what that means by now, right? Simple and inexpensive and easy to complete when you have the attention span of a gnat.) She found a hurricane, a filled candle and a taper candlestick at the dollar store and made her own knock-off Williams Sonoma hurricane candle. For about eleventy bajillion dollars less than WS was asking. Love that! (Have I mentioned before that I kind of have Champagne taste on a Shlitz beer budget?) Seriously, click on over and have a look. I'll wait.

I know!! Wasn't that awesome?!?!

I may have mentioned before that I'm not so great originating the ideas but I'm a heckuva good copier. I can execute, people. I can execute like a madwoman! So I had to head right over to Dollar Tree and then wail in disappointment when they didn't have the tall hurricanes at that particular store. Then I whined a little because I didn't have time to go to another store to look because I had to go pick up my son from the orthodontist. (I now have two children requiring orthodontia. Now you know why I hit Goodwill and the Dollar Tree--because I'm keeping the orthodontist's children in a style to which my own children have never become accustomed. But I digress... [there's a shocker!]) So I decided to take another look to see if I could revamp the idea to suit what I could find.

I found a much shorter candle holder with a thicker base and I liked the shape of it. I found the candlesticks and I used shorter votives to place inside the candle holder. Then following her instructions, I got my hot glue gun out and plugged it in and made a deal with it. I told it that if it wouldn't burn me, I wouldn't cuss at it. Mostly we stuck to our deal. And look at the beauty that came of all that stuff:

Isn't she loverly?

You know what the white stuff is?

Epsom salt!! It's waaaay cheap and it looks really pretty, like fake snow or little ice crystals.

And because I bought a 50 lb. generously-sized bag, I figured that I could find some other things to do with it besides use it to soothe my aching muscles.

So, per Martha Stewart's instructions, I coated some candles with Mod Podge and then rolled some candles in it and then nestled the candles in more salt.

I like the results. It's kind of hard to tell, but these candles almost look like birch logs. So now they look like snow-covered birch logs. Nestled in snow. Can you spot the theme here?

Now Martha had some pretty blue candles that she did this with and they looked lovely, but I didn't have any pretty blue candles. I would have nowhere in my house to put blue candles. So I used what I had. But the blue candles, they are haunting me. I may just have to go buy some and roll them in Mod Podge and salt and give them as a gift. Only time and my tentative grip on sanity will tell...

So there you have it. Easy. Pretty. Salty.

And now if you'll excuse me, for some reason I am craving pretzels...