Welcome to the 2020 edition of the Virtual Advent Tour! I am your host, Sprite, and for the next 24 mornings (around 6 a.m. Eastern U.S. time), I’ll be directing you around the internet, where various bloggers will be sharing parts of their holiday celebrations with you. This is the 13th time we’ve held this event for the entire 24 days and my sixth year as host. I hope you enjoy this tradition as much I do. Should you want to get in on the fun, please leave me a comment on our signup post.
Today’s post is from … me!
This is my Christmas swag, my first decoration of this year’s season. I opted to wait until next weekend to put up our tree, but I wanted to feel festive.
Swags are an alternative to wreaths, and are usually a collection of branches, leaves, and berries, tied together at the stem with ribbons and other decorations and suspended from that end on your door.
Traditionally, it seems, swags are often festoons/garlands, decoratively hung curved over a door or window. I suspect, although I can find no support for this theory, that this current door decoration definition comes from a single end of that, since it resembles that end piece.
Unlike wreaths, swags are relatively easy to make, particularly if you have a real Christmas tree where you are trimming the bottom branches to fit it into the stand. Mum usually opts for this method, as do many tree farms. Or you can gather natural materials specifically for this task, which is what my great-grandparents used to do.
This year, because I wanted a door decoration before I had a tree and because I don’t have ready access to living trees I can just lop pieces off of, I opted to buy one. The garden shop where I purchased it (they were advertising 22 types of wreaths, and I had my fingers crossed) had three varieties. I liked the largest one, but it would have taken up half my apartment door and that seemed silly. So, I opted for this medium-sized one, which seems to fit the bill nicely.
Should you want to make one yourself, it’s an easy craft project and could be a fun one to do with kids or as a gift to leave for neighbors you might normally gift food to.
Here are a few tutorials, should you be interested:
How to Make a Christmas Swag Wreath
Do you decorate your door(s) at the holidays? Do you use a swag or some kind of wreath or a door wrap? Let us know in the comments.
And please stop back tomorrow, where we’ll have a great post waiting for you.
I’ve never heard of swags before! That sounds a great and easy way of decorating the front door. I used to put a wreath on my front door at our old house, but in the decade I moved I haven’t figured it out how to fix one up on the door at my current place, I’ll probably need to get a special hook and it’s probably even cheap, I just haven’t gotten to it yet. But when I do, a swag instead of wreath might be a good idea. Thanks for sharing!
Comment by Jo Kay 12.02.20 @ 12:17 pmSwag is a completely new idea to me. I like it, and it would be something most of us, in normal times, could make ourselves quite easily. Thank you.
Comment by Deb Nance at Readerbuzz 12.03.20 @ 9:43 am