Design Crafters

Having birds and woodland critters in your backyard helps keep gardens healthy year round. When the winter weather sets in, however, the feathered & furry friends need shelter from the cold if you want them to stick around.

I have always had home-made birdhouses in my backyard, but this Christmas I am trying something new. I am building a standard birdhouse, but I am decorating it like a holiday gingerbread house to add some festive fun to my backyard décor.

Making a Christmas-inspired birdhouse is easy. First you need to pick out the type of birdhouse you want to work with. Make sure you use one that is clean of decorations or paint, otherwise, you will have to strip it or work with what you have.

If you are building your birdhouse from scratch, make sure you make the entrance into the birdhouse big enough for your feathered friends, but too small for the neighborhood squirrels to take roost.

Once you have the birdhouse all prepared for decorations, you can begin to plan your house theme. This year I am doing a gingerbread-style birdhouse, with fake gumdrops & candy canes, and I am painting the house in red, white and green stripes to continue the theme. Make sure you use a non-toxic glue, incase one of the birds gets curious and takes a little nibble!

When you are finished decorating, let the birdhouse sit inside for 24-48 hours to let the glue dry, and then voila, you have a beautiful holiday-themed birdhouse for your backyard friends.

When my nephew was first born everyone started looking to see whose mouth, eyes, nose and ears he inherited.  There was only one feature that no one could place. His ears. No one in the family had those ears. At the very top they seemed pinched, almost as though the skin folds of the ears simply didn’t separate. Many people actually have those ears, like Nicholas Cage. It wasn’t so extreme that people would really notice too much and from the side view they looked completely normal. Now from the front view that’s a different story.

For my nephews’ first Christmas pictures, his mom and dad dressed him in a miniature Santa suit and used a realistic snowy Christmas gingerbread house background. As the picture developed and was shared with friends and family, everyone noticed he looked like a baby elf. You see, his ears being pinched in the location they were, made them look like pointy elf ears from a direct front facing view.  The picture was perfect in every sense of the word.

In the backdrop there was a path of “worn” snow that led up to the gingerbread house cabin. It was suppose to look like a foot path, but instead ended up looking like a sledding path that the baby just happened to be placed in front of. So the overall picture appeared to be a miniature baby elf sledding down the hill from the gingerbread cabin, with the biggest laughing smile on his face.

Unfortunately his parents didn’t think about making it into their photo Christmas cards until many years later. To this day that picture serves as a conversation piece.