Hey, it’s Christmas house tour week all over blogland! Or so I’ve gathered. I’m participating in the Very Merry Christmas Home Tour, hosted by Lovely, Etc., and my tour will be up tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s a small teaser, and a super simple Christmas craft.

I posted on Instagram a couple of weeks ago about how I found this Christmas origami set at the thrift store and was now ambitiously envisioning adorable little origami reindeer heads and peace cranes and angels and whatnot all over my house to usher in the holidays.

Then I actually tried to make a crane. And it was HARD. But, still, I was determined. I brought the origami kit along on our Thanksgiving week vacation, and I planned to spend some quiet evenings at the wi-fi-less campground mastering cranes. But then I drank wine and read a book instead, and the origami kit is still out there in the trailer, untouched.

So. Back up plan! Easy paper folding that even _I_ can do! Which means you can, too!

You need:

*a book you don’t mind cutting up

*something shaped like a circle to trace around

*pencil

*scissors

*glue

*hands

Probably you have at least the vast majority of those things already.

Okay, so first you tear a page out of your book (I used a copy of Water for Elephants from the thrift store. But you really didn’t need to know that), trace a half circle on to it (doesn’t matter what size: bigger circles=bigger trees), and cut it out:

Then take one of the outer edges (doesn’t matter which one. DIFFERENT from origami!) and fold it over to about the center of the half circle. Like so:

Now for the trickiest part, which STILL isn’t very tricky. See that part you just folded over? See the pointy corner part that’s sticking up there? Right, so take that and fold it backwards until it meets the straight edge across from it and makes a little tree topper point for you. Like this:

Now you’re almost done! Turn the whole thing over and fold it back over on itself so that it makes a lovely Christmas tree with rounded bottom shape. Like see that part in the picture above that is rounded triangle shaped and has never been folded at all? On the right? You want to that to become the bottom layer of your tree; it will line up (more or less) perfectly with the top layers you’ve already made:

This is about when you’ll notice that you’ve inadvertently selected a page that says “tiny penis” on it:

That’s okay, though! Because this is the back! It won’t show! I haven’t read this book. I don’t know what this is all about it. I know I at least used to have another copy around somewhere, but I never read it. I can’t remember why. Do sad things happen with the elephants? I think maybe I was afraid something terrible would happen to the elephants. Anyway.

Now it should look like this:

Then you just put a dot of glue between each of the layers, and you’re all done!

I hung mine up as a little banner in our foyer (I just taped the trees to the ribbon), but you could do anything with them. ANYTHING. Well, not anything. But maybe attached to packages?  Or….a LONGER banner?