Popsicle Stick Snowflakes

The house is getting cozy, gifts are piling under the tree, Christmas letters have been sent, the wall is filling with those we've received, it's Christmas time and I love it!  As I shared last week I've been trying to decorate while sticking to the budget.  While the Christmas tree skirt was a pretty big failure in that way, I have come across a fantastic craft with which to decorate your walls or windows that was completely free for me!  (Honestly, this happens so infrequently that many shouts of exclamation and excited running around gathering up supplies is incurred when it does.)  I present you with...The Popsicle Sick Snowflakes!

Ruffle Christmas Tree Skirt

What do you do when you're newly married, newly relocated across the country, working hard to stay within budget, and it's that time of year when you're supposed to decorate everything?  You scavenge the internet for DIY Christmas decorations of course!  I thought I'd post this one up first as not all of you may have your trees up yet.  I found this tutorial on Pinterest a while ago for a no-sew ruffle tree skirt and decided to alter it slightly.  People who know me may not exactly say I'm a fan of ruffles and so I'm sure that it comes as just as much a shock to them as it does to me that this is the one I went with.  (This was after lengthy google image and Pinterest searches for a non ruffly one of course!)  Let's just start at the beginning, shall we?

Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Muffins

It's Fall.  Well really it's now Winter but sometimes I like to pretend that it's still that perfect Fall where there's a chill in the air but it hasn't started slipping into Winter weather just yet and it's certainly not the apparent nine months of dreariness that is the North-West.  But that's ok.  I have a pick-me-up for that.  A solution if you will.

For some reason pumpkin flavored things are forever stuck in my mind as a Fall thing, they are most certainly not for Winter.  No sirree!  So when searching for the perfect item to satisfy my constant chocolate craving and make it feel like fall Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Muffins seemed to fit the bill quite nicely.  I found a fantastic recipe in The America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book for Spiced Pumpkin Bread, inserted chocolate where it called for nuts and cranberries, followed their advice on turning a bread into a muffin (P.S. it's just baking them for half the time!), and voila!

Perfection!