Our Christmas Star

When I was little, our family had an aluminum foil star for the Christmas tree, probably made for my parents' first Christmas.  Over the years it had to be fixed; eventually it was attached with rubber bands to a leather wrist band one of my brothers made at scout camp.  Yeah, my mom thought it was the most hideous thing ever.  When I was about 15 or 16 she finally bought a replacement star.

It was a large shiny star, complete with lights.  Probably the thing my mom had dreamed about every year for the past 20 years, staring at our humble little star.  The rest of us were not so sold.  We informed her it ruined the pattern of Christmas tree lights on the ceiling.  We told her we loved the old star, and we wanted it back.  I think some sort of compromise was reached.  The old star was gone, but mom tried to appease us by not turning on the new star.

Apparently I was a bratty teenager.

This is the first Christmas that Dan and I have a full sized tree.  The last few years, we've celebrated with a two foot tall tree, but this year our tree is six feet tall.  We hung up our ornaments about a week ago (non-breakables near the bottom for Emily).  But we lacked a star to top our tree.

So yesterday I started poking around the internet to see if there was a tutorial on how to make your own star.  One site suggested making star ornaments using wire.  My sister has a star ornament she uses for the top of her tree, and it is very pretty, so I kept that in mind but kept looking.  I found a site where they took a star made out of stiffened twine and spray painted it.  This looks nice I thought. They added lights.  Pretty, I thought.  Then they wove in ribbon and hot glued clashing ribbon to the edges.  Hideous.  Moving on.

Eventually I found a blog where a girl shows off her aluminum foil star.  It's also covered in wire strung with beads.  But it's still an aluminum foil star.  And she thinks it is the best star ever.

 Ignoring the "my star is the best" page, I tried to make a wire star.  I scrounged around through my in-law's stash of spray paint, and found some silver glitter paint.  I took a wire coat hanger, and bent it into the shape of a star, planning to wrap it in twine and spray paint the whole thing.  Too big.  So I tried again, resulting in a slightly smaller and more deformed looking star.

So, I decided to go the aluminum foil route.  I cut a star out of cardboard (Emily pretended the scraps were cookies), collected scissors, tape, a discarded toilet paper tube, and then hunted around for my twine.  In the process I lost my cardboard star, and had to hunt for that.  But I found it, and we went upstairs to get some aluminum foil from my mother-in-law's pantry.  (I did look for mine; apparently it has been packed into one of the storage boxes).

Emily, who usually resists going back downstairs, was intrigued by the aluminum foil and followed me back downstairs.  I gave her the leftover bits to play with (some of which I took back later to cover up the all the cardboard in the back).  She also tried to help with the tape.  She stuck on a piece for me--upside down, so it just stuck to her fingers.  I "fixed" it by putting it where I wanted it.

Then I wrapped twine around the star (I actually did this part twice, since the first time it started to unwind).  And since Dan wasn't home to show it off to, and I wasn't going to attempt spraying glitter paint inside with Emily awake, I put it on the top of the tree.  It looks pretty good without the glitter.