Our Christmas “Mantel”

There will be no chestnuts roasting over any open fires this Christmas season for us, friends. Unless, of course, I try again to melt the butter on my toast over a candle and set the bread on fire, in which case I could rush to the nearest…chestnut seller and immediately capitalize on my impromptu blaze. So why no jolly nut-roasting, you ask? Because:

A) I learned my lesson and nobody likes burned toast.

B) I have no actual idea how to properly cook a chestnut.

C) We don’t have a fireplace.

This lack of fireplace means we also don’t have a fireplace mantel, which I’m pretty sure is the #1 reason why I like fireplaces in the first place. Beautifully decked out mantels are all over the blogosphere with every changing season, and I’ve always had to sit out on the fun. Suddenly it dawned on me, though, that even though I don’t have a mantel, I can do mantel-ish things with a fantel.

fantel: (noun) a fake mantel; a hutch, shelf, or otherwise non-mantel object masquerading as a mantel, as in “Erin, having decided that she didn’t want to mope about her lack of mantel for one minute longer, decided to decorate her fantel for Christmas instead.”

(Amanda at Serenity Now once called her fake mantel a fantel and I obviously thought it was clever.)

So: our Christmas fantel-mantel. (It’s really the built-in hutch in our dining room.)

If you couldn’t tell from the DIY Christmas stockings I posted about on Monday, I am liking the non-traditional Christmas colors for my décor. This is partly because red has never been one of my favorite colors (which makes me feel like a traitor on the 4th of July and a Grinch at Christmas)…aaaaand partly because I just like being non-traditional. This is why silver, gray, kelly green, lime green, white, and natural elements make up my palette of choice this Christmas.

I’m still winning my traditional-red-and-green-to-the-death husband over on this one, but even he admitted that my stockings and my fantel were elegant AND festive. If something with a name like fantel can exist in the same sentence as elegant.

No credit card limit was sacrificed in the making of this fantel-mantel, because it’s decked out exclusively with stuff that we already had around the house. I spray painted these ceramic birds kelly green...

…and found these ceramic birds (they’re actually salt and pepper shakers, originally from Pier One) at Goodwill over the summer. The fabric is from here a million months ago. This is the first use I’ve found for it, though of course at the time I bought it for some other Pressing and Essential Reason.

The branch is compliments of our backyard and a few coats of polyurethane spray to give it some shine and a more durable finish. The glass bottle the branch is in is compliments of some neighbor’s recycling bin from when we lived in our apartment.

So is this pretty green bottle. I have no shame.

The other glass objects (the apothecary jar and the wide-mouth vase) both came from TJ Maxx at some point over the past year. Rick likes when I buy the former because it’s called an apothecary jar. He wonders why it is filled with ornaments and weird ball things, though, and not Cymbalta or fungal ointment or some other fun thing an apothecary dispenses.

Speaking of ornaments, all the ones you see have been accumulated over the past several years, generally in the form of 90% off after Christmas.

The greenery and the imperfectly perfect “stump” are courtesy of our Christmas tree, which was just a few inches too tall to fit in our room once we hauled it home. I’d say the million minutes poor Rick spent sawing this off were well worth it. He may vote otherwise.

So that’s our Christmas mantel-fantel, which I am loving eating breakfast next to in the mornings. There’s just something about glowing Christmas lights when everything is quiet that makes an impending day of teenagers seem all the more bearable.

Do you have a real mantel, or do you have a fantel-mantel? Does it get a makeover with every passing season? What’s your color scheme of choice this Christmas? Do share. And have a wonderful Wednesday while you’re at it. :)

P.S. Stocking tutorial will be up Friday. As in this Friday. As in not some Friday in 2019. Promise. UPDATE: I made good on that promise! The tutorial can be found here.

***I’m linking this up to Tater Tots & Jello’s Weekend Wrap-Up Party and Southern Hospitality’s Holiday Mantel Party!***