Cozy and Simple Christmas Mantel

If you follow me on Instagram (@landeelu), then you may have seen me post this picture last week…

Over the summer a few of our aspen trees had died and we had to cut them down.  Apparently aspens are on, like, a 10 year cyce or something?  Which is annoying because we have a LOT of them and I’m not looking forward to them all dying off here in the next little while.  But, enough about that… the point is, we took care of all of the branches and then I thought there HAS to be something I could do with these pretty trunks!  So I kept them in the garage for a few months until Christmas rolled around.   Then I decided these babies were destined for my mantel this year!

I just used my table saw and cut the trunks in to various sized pieces and lined them all up!  What I love about this mantel  is that it appears such a simple Christmas design but there has to be 35-40 individual pieces up there.  I added my red bead garland and a dried boxwood wreath to begin with and loved how it was coming together.

Then I decided I needed a *little* more color and festivite-ness so I found a 1×6 in my garage and made this “Cherish the Season” sign to add some more red.

I am so glad I decided to hang on to those aspen trunks!  Totally worth tripping over them in the garage for the past few months. 🙂