Vintage Chrsitmas Decorating and Create A NYE Balloon Drop

Hello friends! Welcome to my channel. My name is Kat. Today we are going to explore a vintage Christmas, and I'm just going to take you through a little home tour of mine. And I put up a vintage-y style Christmas tree this year. The tree itself isn't vintage, but the ornaments on it are all pre-World War II. They're all, they all date back from the 1930s, so they're very old. We have kept them in our family for a very long time. And we are solely the only owners of these ornaments, so it's only been passed through my family since they were bought. So, I didn't go out and collecting them in vintage thrift stores. I'm real weird about buying stuff in vintage thrift stores because I'm always worried I'm gonna bring back home, like, some kind of haunted artifact or something that's gonna make a knocking on the wall in the middle of the night. So, I try to stay out of vintage stores unless there's just something I absolutely cannot live without. Like, say it's like an old vintage sewing machine or something that's just very particular that I want. So, in this case, all the vintage items, they are mine. They've been collected by my family throughout the years. So, I'm gonna take you on a little mini tour, and we're gonna explore, and then afterwards we're gonna do our annual Halloween. Halloween? Wow, it has been a long year this year. The New Year's balloon drop that we like to do just because it's fun. We don't really like to go out and party on New Year's Eve. I mean, I'm sure it's fun in other areas of the world where you guys live, but here where I live, there's just not a whole lot going on, and there's just not a good place to go and party. That, and I have kids, and they don't really want to be, you don't want to be out and about with them if you want to go to a party. It's just, you'll have to get a baby. It's just not gonna work. So, we're gonna do it here at home, and I'm gonna bring you along. So, stick around, and let's go touring. I've already taken the painstaking task of putting the ornaments on the tree, and as you can see, there's a Chick-fil-A ornament that got snuck on the tree right there front and center, and that is for my kid. They know us on a first-name basis here locally at our Chick-fil-A, so of course some of the ornaments aren't as vintage as I wanted it to be, but most all of them are, and there's some new ones that did get snuck on. I just wanted to do a daylight close-up of an ornament here, and you can see the heavy patina on this ball, and I can't tell you where it was made. It's just heavily rusted on the top, and then also I wanted to show you I had some vintage icicles that were actually made in Memphis, Tennessee, and it was an original package of these icicles, and as you know, we make hardly nothing anymore in America, and so I was really excited to find this. Even the original price tag was on the bottom of 24 cents at Walgreens, so I'm guessing these were around in the 80s is when this package was purchased, and we're just gonna throw these up on the tree, and I know it's so practical. Women get dressed up in old evening gowns and decorate their Christmas tree because that's what we do nowadays. So when I started to put the lights on the tree, I started off with LED white, close to like a warm white strand of bulbs, like the little skinny wire type of lights that come usually, I guess, with a pre-lit tree, but my tree isn't pre-lit, so I add different lights every year. I put it on the tree, and then I found a strand of the colored bulbs, and the bulbs weren't on the strand, but the bulbs that were with it, I believe, were original from the 80s, and they are not LED. They are the hot type C7 light bulbs, and they have that kind of warm, fun color glow, and I put them over the white lights just to give it an extra brightness on the tree, and I see there's kind of a resurgence this year of the C7 old colored light bulb look, and very retro looking, and they're LED, and in the future, I may purchase a strand of them just because I do kind of unplug the colored lights when I'm not around the house, but I do leave the white ones on at all times, but it would be nice to have a strand that are LED just so you don't have to worry about it cooking your ornaments or, I don't know, just cooking your house, I guess, in general when you decide you want to leave real quick, but I really do kind of enjoy the color on the tree. It is kind of making it fun this year. I know you're thinking like, wow, it's taking a long time to put tinsel on the tree, but just when you have only one box, I feel like an artist, and I feel like I'm just painting the tree with it to give it the most maximized effect with one little box of tinsel because I just want it to feel like the tree is completely draped in metal when I'm done, even though it's only one box, and I know when you were a kid, you probably had like 10 boxes, and you threw tinsel on it like confetti, and it was no thing, but now it seems like it's harder and harder to come by, so I'm really just kind of taking my time with it and just wanting the tree to have an effect of where it's just draped in these icicles when I'm finished. And my favorite Santa blow mold. I always put him up over the mirror, and a couple years ago, I accidentally dropped him, and his face cracked a little bit, and I see there are people that do fix them, so I may have to send them away and have him have a little facelift because I do like him. Here's a little project I left for my kid to do so we can have something festive out on the table, and it's close to what I envisioned it should be, but you know, they just kind of use their own imagination and all the different little desserts, you know, just all the fun stuff through the holiday. And of course, you got to have a little kitchen disaster for the holidays. I have a jello mold here, and I had my heart with it set on to look like this photo over here on the left, but it ended up looking like the pink slime from Ghostbusters 2, and absolutely nobody wanted to try this thing. It was just atrocious to look at. I mean, it tasted fine, but no, nobody sprung for it. And then you can't have the holidays without a little surf and turf, so here we had a little prime rib and lobster, and of course our fancy desserts. We just go a little extra on the as I hope you do as well. One more little walk through before Christmas Day, and just kind of going through. This will be the last day that the house is put in order because the chaos will destroy it tomorrow, first thing, but it's okay. And the cats were really good. They didn't tear up anything or tear down the tree like I was kind of anticipating they would. Oh yes, and there's some little feet excited because Santa still comes to visit our house as of this year, so we had to have little snacks left out for Santa for the night, but one little glance at our vintagey Christmas tree for the year before all the chaos ensues and it gets destroyed. And on to the fun part here, getting ready for New Year's Eve, and yes, I have a little balloon blower upper here, and I have balloons that I keep on hand just year-round for birthday parties and various things, so I just kind of bust it out, and we're just going to fill up some balloons. And I know you probably notice like, wow, why do you have plastic over your furniture? And you can see all these little fur balls running all over my house, and they really love any kind of nice furniture that you have. They don't care about your crappy furniture, but anything that is new and nice and you want to keep nice, they like to sink their little claws in it, and so I'm guessing I'm going to have to get some of those air cans that will scare them and blow a puff of air at them when they cross the barrier of getting too close to want to put their claws in it, and I just haven't gotten around to getting those yet, but I'm thinking that'll probably be the best thing because I have the kind of cats where you can buy those little like cat trees that are covered in carpet. Yeah, they could care less about that stuff, but anything nice that you want to keep nice, that is their target. They are onto you, and that's what they're going after. Also, I'm embarrassed to say I have a knee brace on. I have done something to my leg, but don't worry, it's getting better. It's just something that just a fluke that happens, I guess, whenever you're whenever you're somebody like me and you treat your body like an amusement park. It sometimes has little hiccups, and we're just kind of dealing with it, and we're rolling through the new year with our hiccups, but now I'm not wearing a knee brace that big, just a little tiny strap, so it is getting better, but I know I'm not the only one who experiences little aches and pains and little oopsies, so yeah, just you just have to roll with it. Okay, so we're getting the right amount of balloons here, and I'm getting ready to, I guess, get out our plastic to hold our drops, so I'm just going to be using these clear plastic bags, and I'm going to spread them out on the floor, and I'll show you kind of my method as to how I do it, and these were smaller than the ones I normally like to use. I don't know why my big ones, I just I didn't have any in the house this year, so I just kind of grabbed whatever I had so I didn't have to go out hunting for, you know, just extra stuff, so we're just going to make this work. Okay, as you can see, I only ended up using two garbage bags that I separated out, and I'm going to tape together, and then I also have this big spool of ribbon that I'm going to use to combine the two when I get closer to finish, and I'll show you what I do with that, and then in the background, I have my podcast on. If I'm not listening to music, currently, right now, I'm listening to Let's Get Spooky, and I usually will watch it on YouTube, and or I also like True Hauntings, and I believe it's two older ladies from, I want to say Australia, but that podcast is a lot of fun too if you check it out, and I just like to have something on as background noise, but I don't know, let me know what you're into and what you've been listening to lately. Okay, here you can see the bags are spread out, and you can see where I cut in the middle and spread the bags open, but also right here in the center, I'm going to cut like a slit right here in the middle, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take that ribbon, and I'm almost going to make like a very loose, like I'm going to kind of sew a corset, I guess you would say, right in the middle, and so that's going to hold the balloons in place when I fill it up on the ceiling, because you're going to want to be able to pull some the strings and loosen that wide open, and the best way I could think of was like a corset coming from both directions. So while I've got you here, and we're just cutting and sewing up our balloon drop, are you guys the kind of people that are New Year's resolutioners? Because I'm here to tell you, like I absolutely just do not resignate with trying to create some kind of pressured resolution for myself this time of year. This don't feel good, you're kind of in and out of work, you're stressing between your job trying to create the holidays and do all the things, and then on top of that I just don't feel the need to put extra pressure on myself to create something completely new and different in my life, and I don't know, some people are just really all about it, but I don't know, for me I just it just doesn't it doesn't resonate with me. You know, if you're looking for something different as far as a resolution, and you just want to make different improvements in your life, just start small, because everything kind of starts in the thought form, and once you have it in thought, it will slowly materialize over time, and it doesn't have to come in some form of a grand, huge gesture. It can just be something tiny and micro, and just, you know, eventually over time it'll just show up, and you'll look back, and you'll be like, wow, I dreamed of this, and here it is, I finally have it, and you just don't have to overnight stress yourself into, I need a perfect body, or I need, you know, a totally different job and career and that type of thing. Just kind of lean into what you like just a little bit each day, and eventually what you're after will eventually come looking for you. You know, I feel like I have lived on top of this ladder more during the holidays than any other time of the year. I seem to climb the ladder to decorate the tree, tape stuff to the ceiling, and during the holidays, I swear, I think I feel like I live on top of a ladder. I don't know, do you guys feel that way when you're at home too? I, because I totally do. Okay, here we are. We are taped up, and as you can see, I left a couple of strings here for the pool, and it's loosely corseted, and what it'll do is basically you'll pull the strings and the balloons should drop. That should be what I designed it to do anyway, and you can tell I gave it a little bit of lag in the plastic, so, because obviously you got to have a place for your balloons to fit. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get as many as I can here in the center, and then I'm going to tape off the sides so they won't obviously fall out the back side when I'm throwing them in like that. I've done this balloon drop now for the past couple of years, and I think next year I want to change it up. I'd like to do something bigger, and so I'm gonna have to really kind of think about how to, I don't know, reconstruct this and make this even a larger kind of drop somehow, but right now it works. This year it's great and it's fun, but I don't believe I will do the same type of thing next year. But like I said, I've done it so many times I feel like I can put it up on the ceiling in less than an hour. Okay, we're gonna call this good and done for now. I'm gonna get cleaned up. As you can see, I look like a total hag after climbing up and down the ladder. I'm hot, sweaty, and we're gonna get out our little poppers and party favors for the night, and once I get cleaned up, we'll come back and we'll party. And after every party, of course, there is the cleanup. So I'm gonna bring you along for that as well, and you can see it's not as bad as you would think. Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope you enjoyed the mini tour of my home this holiday and that you were inspired. Maybe something fun jumped out at you that you could try in your own world, and until next time, I'll see you in the new year. So happy 2026, everyone! Bye!