For my December Daily entry today, I’m going to journal about our experience of decorating a tree for our local Zoo.  Back in November, my friend Cathy discovered that our zoo was asking groups to volunteer to decorate a tree for the Enchanted Forest at the zoo.  She signed us (Cathy, Carol and I) up and called our group “Pinterest Pals”.

All of our decorations (minus the lights and the tree topper) were ideas we found via Pinterest, were repurposy, earth and animal friendly and extremely inexpensive.  There was the acorn garland that I shared as a Pinterest365 post using hemp cording, acorns from my yard and buttons from our stash.

Cathy, Carol and I also took small mason jar lids, painted them and decorated with stamps and glitter.  Cathy sprayed them with a clear acrylic because they needed to stand up to the weather which has been very bad this past weekend.  We punched a hole in the top of the lids and strung raffia ribbons that we tied onto the branches.

Cathy also took the hemp cording and hot glued pine cones to it and tied them to the tree as well as red bows.

To begin with because of the storms in this area, we were on standby for our decorating time today.  If the weather was going to be too bad, we were to come back on Monday, but at 8:30am we got word that decorating was a go.  The area where are trees were was called the Enchanted Forest, but in yesterday’s storm about half of the trees had fallen down and they estimated that several more would go that way by the end of the weekend.  We managed to find a tree that was almost straight, on top of the hill near the wolf enclosure.  It took about an hour for Cathy, Bruce, Carol and I to decorate our tree and we were very pleased with the result.  We can only hope that it survives the wind and the rain.

We’re planning on going back in the next couple of weeks in the evening when the whole zoo is lit up and see our tree.  I’ll post more pictures then. 

“Yeah, we’re just checking on something.  Whenever you visit places with animals you have a tendency to want to bring them home.  Don’t bring any wolves home.  That wouldn’t be cool.”