Repurposing Decorations: St. Patrick’s Day, Easter and Beyond

Posted on March 17, 2011 by GuestPost
Categories: Simplification

This is a guest post by Rebecca Chelsey. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines here.

Photo by Brainedge

There are so many major holidays in a year that by Christmas your storage room (or in my case, the attic) is stuffed with boxes of holiday decorations that you won’t use until the next year. I don’t enjoy clutter even in my storage room. When I have to go into my attic to find anything it’s a nightmare.

Then one day, while I was rummaging through all these forgotten decorations, I saw a plain Christmas wreath that I had abandoned since the I’d purchased many better kinds. Right then I realized how much of a waste it is to toss this to the side and not utilize it. This was the day when I finally dug through my boxes and decided to put together a little re-purposing craft project for spring.

With two major holidays coming up, it will be nice to have some spring themed decorations around the house. St. Patrick’s Day and Easter are both holidays that are celebrated in a day’s time. For me, it would be a waste to buy a load of decorations for these two holidays and have to either discard or store them away. Re-purposing holiday decorations to fit other holidays means you would be saving money and the world by reducing the amount of waste produced.

Easter

The first thing I did with the Christmas wreath I found was to see if I had any yellow ribbons in my arts and crafts box. I found several bright spring color ribbons and used those to wrap around the wreath and tie a bow on the bottom. If this is not Easter enough for you, go to a crafts store and purchase tiny Easter eggs to glue onto the wreath. Simple as that! Now you have your first re-purposed holiday decoration in a matter of ten minutes.
The next thing I thought of for Easter was to gather gift wrapping paper from Christmas and shred them to make Easter confetti grass. These Easter grass can be used to decorate egg baskets for you to place Easter eggs in or for your children when they do an Easter egg hunt.
If you want to decorate a bowl and place Easter eggs as a centerpiece, you can also paint old round Christmas ornaments pastel yellow, pink, green, and other spring colors to make it look like Easter eggs. Another thing you can do with Christmas ornaments is to decorate a lovely Easter tree using any pastel colored ornaments to decorate a small Christmas tree.
After Christmas sales are the best time to scout for great leftover ornaments or other decorative items, such as lamb ornaments and baby Jesus from nativity sets as it would be appropriate for Easter as it was for Christmas.

St. Patrick’s Day

For St. Patrick’s Day decoration, and found my green Christmas lights from a couple months ago. We had accidentally bought these green lights instead of the more generic soft yellow lights. Who knew a mistake would come in handy now for another holiday! I happily took the lights out as I could use them again for St. Patrick’s Day. Anything green goes for this holiday.
To make leprechaun hats for the celebration, you could use empty half gallon ice cream cartons as the top part of the hat along with some green, black, and yellow construction paper. All it takes is just a bit of craft work!

To throw some of my other ideas in the mix, I have also reminded myself that I can always use Halloween fake cobwebs as snow for Christmas and perhaps string it on the Christmas trees for the winter effect. For decorative pumpkins during Halloween, I would purchase plastic pumpkins and gourds so I can keep them for Thanksgiving and not worry about having to purchase more pumpkins for the following year as well. All in all, I had taught myself a valuable lesson with recycling and re-purposing decorations for other holidays to save myself from putting a dent in my wallet and to avoid adding more clutter into my attic.

Rebecca Chelsey loves to spend time her family and holidays are her favorite. Outside her life as mother and wife, she also works for Homeseasons, which has simplified the holidays with 4th of July decorations, Halloween Holiday arrangements and ideas for every holiday in between.

Photo by Brainedge