Since my mom is here visiting and it’s almost New Years, we decided to go down to the Rheingau with hopes of finding some good sparkling wine for the celebration. Our first stop was Kloster Eberbach which is more or less a tourist trap but the grounds are quite nice and we happened to get a great idea for the doors of our wine cellar…
After we left the monastery, we drove some of the back roads and also happened to come across some incredibly beautiful homes. The detail work on these places is just amazing and the pictures barely do them justice…but this particular one was actually the local post office. We also happened to find a place which was for sale and a really lovely farm – but we figure we have enough on our hands already lol.
We’ve talked several times about putting out at least one of the sleighs in our courtyard next year and loading it up with wrapped “packages” (i.e. empty boxes) to decorate next year. We’ve also discussed the potential of putting a few Christmas trees in the courtyard and possibly even outside the gate so others can also enjoy them…but there’s always the concern about someone coming by and trashing the ornaments or just stealing them in general. We saw a house a few weeks ago that actually had a Christmas tree hanging from a hook near the roof which meant no one could get to the tree at all but this could be a bit complicated to orchestrate…but while we were in Rheingau, one of the hotels had a bunch of trees outside decorated with straw ribbon and dried orange slices. Not a bad idea at all and inexpensive enough that you don’t have to worry about someone trying to vandalize it.
Since we also stopped in the hotel for some lunch/early dinner, I also got a few more ideas such as stringing together wine corks with straw ribbon and stringing it through pieces of garland. They also had these cute little Christmas trees built out of simple pieces of wood which we should almost definitely duplicate for ourselves next year.
