Real Pine Made Christmas Wreaths

The Relief Society presidency set up an activity to make wreaths and it was gonna be this HUGE deal. A program and everything. My mom taught me how to make some wreaths (fake ones, already bought at the dollar store) and I thought it was kind of fun, so I signed up to make two wreaths. I was under the impression that we would be doing the same kind of fake wreaths. Just learning to decorate them or whatever. NOT SO. Boy, was I in for a surprise. When I walked into the gym, there were pine boughs EVERYWHERE. The gym smelled like one big christmas tree. Women were cutting limbs and wrapping wire all over the place. I signed up to make two!? How very ambitious of me.

I got started right away without reading the instructions, and everyone knows that's always a dumb thing to do. Because of that, it took me MUCH longer to do my wreath. And being a little bit of a perfectionist, I went much slower and wrapped wire tighter and redid a few boughs. After about a half hour of layering my wreath frame and getting nowhere close to the end, I decided it was time to call in for back-up. ASHLEY!!! HELP ME! That's how desperate my phone call sounded. haha She's an amazing girl. She drove right over and did the second wreath for me and even FINISHED BEFORE ME!! That's how ridiculous I was making it. I realized, after someone came over and helped us finish ours, that I made it much harder than it had to be. I thought it had to be in some crazy elaborate way, and really, all you had to do was lay the boughs down wrap wire around them to keep them on the frame and that was it!

I really enjoyed the activity. It was a shock but at least now I can say that I know how to make a real home-made wreath. And now my wreath is hanging on the door with pride. We'll probably give the second one away to someone.