Just wondering if anyone else is slightly relieved that the stress of the holidays is over?

Putting away all the Christmas decorations and relieving the bits and pieces from storage that I had stowed away to make room for all those fairy lights and glittery baubles felt therapeutic in some ways.  The shopping, the parties, the wrapping, the decorating, the endless conversations of whether or not you’ve completed your Christmas to-do list and the stress of visitors (much as I enjoy it) is finally over and now I feel like we can settle into the new year, look forward to what lies ahead and just get back to a normal routine.  Oh and detox.  Yeah, definitely need to detox.

What do you do to de-stress after the panic of the holidays is over?

Something I did to de-stress was spending a couple of hours on one of my days off last week cleaning and removing labels from a number of bottles I had been keeping thanks to their interesting shapes.  Not that I knew what I was going to do with them but I knew I liked ’em.

Probably because I see pretty things like this on blogs:

Swoon.

And soaking them in boiling water, cleaning them with white spirits and washing them with warm soapy water felt good – a cleansing somehow, out with the old (alcohol mostly) and in with the new (pretty vases!), was a pretty good start.

So once the task of clearing out all of my Christmas decorations was complete, I decided it was time to let the now-new bottles shine.

There was one spot in my kitchen that had been naked for a little while which I thought would work.  I had a Gerbera in this little windowsill for about 6 months but once the cold weather hit and despite my nursing, it had come to the end of it’s life…

I was sad to lose my little Gerbera so decided to buy a lovely bright red mum to place there in the autumn… which, with the lack of sunlight and general passing of time, died.  Sensing a pattern, aren’t you?

So I decided to break out my little bottles and place a few on my naked windowsill.  Using a few dried branches from a bush in our (now defunct thanks to winter) garden, there’s little chance of any more plant deaths.

And I think they look kinda cool too.

Not beautiful.  But cool.

Image credits: 1. Via 2. A Beach Cottage 3-5.My own