I didn't think I would be writing about Christmas for another year, but I wanted to share one of the decorations that we added to our house over the holidays.  Not that it's even remotely related to Christmas, other than it was a little tree, but it was there during the festivities, so it counts.

A couple weeks before Christmas we were busy getting the house ready for company and the holidays, but most importantly, we were glued to the couch every Sunday night watching the last couple episodes of Dexter Season 6, (this season=crazy town).  Most of you know that we're huge Dexter fans, something about that crazy Dexter and his dark passenger just gets us all excited.  And when our cable company screwed up a bill one month, they offered to give us Showtime for 6 months for free (yeah, picture me doing cartwheels around the room).  Since we usually have to wait until they come out on DVD we were super excited to watch in real time. 

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Okay, back to the decorations part of this post.  And, if your not Dexter fans, (you should be), but you might not completely understand the references so go Google it, or again, just watch it!  Well, we were hanging out with some friends talking about the latest season and the series in general when we came up with an off the wall comment about making a completely themed Dexter Christmas tree (there was a giant decorated tree in the room so it wasn't that crazy).  You know, with knives and hypodermic needles as decorations.  We all laughed about it and went home, but the idea was planted.  Mike and I started making comments over the next couple days, like "We could make a tree skirt out of plastic sheeting, like his kill rooms." or "How cool would it be to use saran wrap as ribbon?".

Anyways, we started thinking we should really do it, but obviously we're not totally crazy enough to make our big tree completely themed, so I bought a 2' white tree from Target for $8.  It was white shimmer which did not look very Dexterish, so I bought some flat white spray paint and sprayed the whole thing.  (For anyone like Mike, who thought it would be flaky and crunchy, it is a tiny bit crunchy, but I used very thin layers and sprayed at all angles using the kind that's made for applying on plastic so it wasn't flaky at all).  Then I used my paper crafting skills and some things we had around the house to make our 'Killer' tree:


Like I said, we used some plastic sheeting that Mike found in the garage as our tree skirt, some little tiny trash bags I made cutting squares from a regular bag and filling with scraps as the presents, or anyone familiar with the show - body bags, and although you can't really see in this photo, saran wrap folded into a long ribbon that wraps around the tree.

For the ornaments we had different things from the series, including gloves, needles, knives, hammers, scalpels, and of course blood slides.  I used a transparency sheet and cut them into little rectangles, then I used food coloring and clear glue to make the fake blood.  The night I made them, they looked really good and more opaque, but as they dried they got weird looking and the centers more clear.  Next time I need fake blood I'll have to try something different.

Some close-ups show some of the ornaments:




Overall, we had a blast making our creepy little tree.  And, pretty much all of our friends and my family watch Dexter and got all the little references.


We only spent about $10 so we thought it would be a one-time thing, but it was fun having a little themed table top tree so we saved the tree and are already thinking of next year's theme!