Christmas fun in the old freezer
Many years ago, Jeanne d'Arc Living bought an old house to fix it up. Down in the garden was this fine old freezer between scrub and trees, in the best "Hans and Grethe" style as in a real fairy tale. The house has now been sold, but before then it was nicely decorated for Christmas, with lots of natural materials we found right outside the door.
Outside the house there is this small, covered entrance where you can sit under the half roof and enjoy the silence and the scents of the forest in peace and quiet with a blanket around your legs. It's pure magic. We have decorated with lots of larch branches, both outside and inside, and the choice was obvious, as there are a lot of larch trees in the forest. A zinc tub is filled with pine tops – also found in the forest – and it adorns the door. We also tied a nice wreath of larch branches with pine cones to the door.
Inside the house, we used even more large larch branches, which were hung over the beams crosswise, so that they almost form a small roof in the room. Lots of different wreaths hang in the windows, all tied together from the materials that we have been able to find in nature right outside the door. The wreaths are all different sizes, but each wreath is made of the same material. The troll branches were too wild to tie into a wreath, but they are fine for a simple decoration, such as here, where we have placed block lights on a plate and placed lots of troll branches around.
The old wood-burning stove quickly heats up the room, and the walls are well insulated from the days when the cold had to be kept in. As the room is small, it doesn't take long before it's warm enough to hold a small get-together – possibly with mulled wine and apple slices – after a walk in the forest. We also used the room to sit and tie the wreaths in, so maybe a Sunday where you invite friends and family to gather greens in the forest and make decorations together could be a good idea. A room like this has so many uses – not just in the summer, but all year round.
