The Complete Guide To Chanukah Decorating

Note on December 12, 2013: I wrote this post last week but I wanted to include it in Kelly's Christmas Tour Of Homes. I realize Chanukah isn't Christmas though! We are an inter-faith family and we get to celebrate both holidays. Lucky us :) Sometimes my Chanukah and Christmas decorating overlaps, depending on how close they are together. This year, Chanukah was over before I started my Christmas decorating though so I did a separate post. You can check out my Christmas decorating post here. Thanks for stopping by to visit!

 

So even though I'm not very good at it, I like decorating for holidays. It's a little awkward decorating for a holiday that isn't technically mine, but since Dave doesn't really care about decorating, I do it anyways! Although, as you will see, Dave did make a significant contribution to the Chanukah decorating this year.

I started off by making a Chanukah banner. An awesome step-by-step tutorial for this extremely complicated masterpiece is coming later this week. Because I had to wing it on my own and I don't want you all to have to do the same thing. You're welcome.

And then Sam totally showed me up by whipping off this adorable "Happy Chanukah" banner in about five minutes. I was impressed. He won't write a tutorial for you though, because he wants to keep this one to himself.

We hung our store-bought banner above our kitchen sink to bring a little bit of Chanukah to every room.

 

Dave's aunt sent us some gel letters and driedels. The driedels ended up in the dining room windows and in Rachel's room, but the letters adorned the mirror in our front entry.

I got Dave to make some six-pointed stars out of the extra scrapbook paper from the Chanukah banner, and we stapled them to some silver ribbon and hung them up at various places in our house. Above is the garland in our office.

Sam cut up the extra scrapbook paper to be used for "more Chanukah decorating" so I turned my blue glass balls into a menorah and Sam's decorations have been the "flames." We "light" a new candle every night. It's a little off-beat but hey! I bet no other family has a menorah like this :) (And now that I've published it, I expect this picture will get Pinned about a million times and there will be an "official" version for sale in time for next Chanukah. Just remember, you saw it here first!)

And then, of course, we lit our menorah every night. But you've already seen those pictures. It was fun decorating for Chanukah and it was especially fun to have Sam put forth some of his own ideas. I can't wait to see how our holiday decorating changes through the years.