Homemade Christmas Decorations from Items in Your Back Yard

Looking for some easy Christmas decoration ideas? Give your home a natural look this holiday season. You can turn ordinary items from your own back yard and the produce section of your grocery store into exceptional Christmas decorations. They're easy, festive and inexpensive!

Clear glass vases and cylinders are good starting points. Fill them with lemons, limes or apples. Try pine cones, nuts or cranberries. You can add bows made of wired Christmas ribbon around the cylinders. Have a crystal punch bowl that gets used maybe once every five years? Pull it out and make it the dining room table centerpiece by simply filling it with fruit. Using just one kind of fruit makes a dramatic statement; imagine your punch bowl filled with gorgeous red apples. If you really want those apples to shine, polish them with a little vegetable shortening. This trick works for leaves, as well. And if you don't have a large punch bowl, try any clear bowl with a pedestal, such as a trifle bowl. If you need to scale down a bit, substitute lemons.

Take a fresh look at your backyard. Most yards have some type of greenery all year round. Fill large baskets with enormous bunches of cut greenery. Fill an empty coffee can with water, submerge the greenery stems and place inside a basket. If you have a lot of greenery, the can will never show, but the water will keep it greener longer.

You can also search your yard for berries, seed pods and abandoned bird's nests. You might consider those gum balls from sweet gum trees as trash that needs to be raked, but they will look great in an old basket. If you're lucky enough to have cedar, pine or magnolia trees, you can let your Christmas imagination soar.

A cluster of pillar candles is another easy idea, and you can usually find them at the dollar store. Go with the organic theme here, too. Place an odd number of pillar candles on a tray and surround them with mounds of cranberries. For a professional look, make sure candles are of several different heights.

Herbs are a good choice for decorations, and they will add scent to your holiday home. This time of year, you can often find rosemary "trees" in clay pots or galvanized containers. If you have a green thumb, you can keep the rosemary going long after Christmas. Fill three vases with bunches of parsley or cilantro, and stand them in a row. Parsley also makes a good mixer in flower arrangements. Throw out the predictable greenery that comes with a grocery store bundle of flowers and add some sprigs of greenery from your yard. And when you buy those grocery store flowers, don't overlook the ones often scorned by florists as too common.. Red and white carnations look luxurious when massed together in huge numbers.

Don't leave out vegetables when planning your holiday look. Baskets of red, green and yellow peppers make a lovely display. When they start looking a little tired, slice them and sauté them for fajitas! If you can find Brussels sprouts still on the stem, they make a quite unusual centerpiece.

The very best part of a natural Christmas? Clean-up is a breeze. Some of it can wind up as dinner, and the rest goes straight to the trash or compost pile!