The frugal Christmas decorations - part 1

While living in Europe, I never saw a huge point of doing a lot of decorating for the holidays because I'm always in the US for most of the period. Therefore, I went very minimal with just a string of lights in Germany.

Similar to yesterday's topic of a secondhand Christmas, rather than buying one more 'made in China' thing which would clutter up a landfill someday, I decided to buy my holiday decorations from the charity shops here in my corner of Essex.

OK, so there are five of them so I have plenty of choices, and plus, the profits are going to the charity rather than some big non-local corporation.

Behold, my first purchase:

Yes, that's an actual Weihnachtspyramide (Christmas pyramid) from Germany. It was in a German box, no wonder no one here in the UK bought it, it probably looks like the oddest thing if you haven't seen one before. For a mere 3.95 GBP it was mine, complete with the candles (looking a little worse for the wear, but with a price tag in DM!).

The garland was also a recent purchase there. For 2.50 GBP I picked up a gigantic catch-all back of various garlands and strings of tinsel in all sorts of colors and sizes.

I wasn't sure what the cat would thing about the pyramid, or the tinsel for that matter, so it's safely resting on top of the bookshelf being ignored. :-)