I’m not doing anything Christmas-related this year — no decorating, no gifts, nothing. I don’t mean to be a Grinch, but it’s really started to bug me how for the entire month of December (and even some of November!) the holiday is foisted on people whether they like it or not. You can’t watch TV or go grocery shopping or sit in a coffee shop without the world shouting GUESS WHAT, CHRISTMAS!!!! in your ears. I remember as a kid not really understanding the whole “Christmas is too commercial” message in the Charlie Brown special… well, Linus, I get it now. That kid was wise beyond his years.

Anyhoo. The winter scene in the four seasons roombox isn’t going to be overly Christmassy, but I did make a couple of season-appropriate plants for it. (Also: I looked up “Christmassy” and this is how the internet says I should spell it. Looks weird to me, but if it’s on the internet it must be true.)

The first plant is an amaryllis from an SDK Miniatures kit. My mom has given me amaryllis bulbs in the past and they bloom in the Christmas/winter timeframe, so it seemed fitting for the roombox. Here are the ones I grew last year.

(I say that like I had anything to do with it. My mom helped me plant them in pots and then I just put the pots near the window and this is what happened.)

When my parents visited earlier this month, my mom helped me put the kit together. It starts with making a bud out of a glob of glue. This took a long time to dry and gravity kept dragging the blob down in the interim. Maybe tacky glue wasn’t the right choice.

I’ve made a few SDK kits in the past but it’s apparently been a very long time, because then the kits came with punched-out colored paper that needed to be folded and snipped to make petals. Now the petals are laser cut, on white paper, and need to be painted. Apprehensive about painting such teeny tiny pieces, I used fine tip magic marker instead.

Pro: they dried quick! Con: I only had one color of green and it’s not a super realistic leaf color. We colored gray over the green to temper the color a bit.

(Note: the red isn’t *quite* this red. The camera’s automatic color setting got overenthusiastic.)

Here’s the completed amaryllis in the window. We didn’t consider when “planting” the flowers that the window sashes would get in the way of the flower. Hmm.

Everything was glued into the pot at this point and I didn’t want to destroy it, so I started looking around for containers I could put the shallow pot into, to give it a boost. Nestled into this flowerpot, it sort of kind of looks like one big pot with a ridge around the top. Maybe?

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(I live in California, so I can flippantly say “Let it snow!” on Thanksgiving without the risk of it actually happening…)

With the bushes finished, I can move forward with landscaping the four seasons roombox. Today I added snow to the winter scene. It was fun! Maybe not quite as fun as playing in the real snow, but also not nearly as cold and wet. Here’s how the scene started out.

I started on the side with the bush. I spread Snow Tex on the ground, using a scrap of strip wood to keep it from seeping over the edge. I dabbed some snow on the bush and squished it into the snow.

I didn’t glue this — I’m hoping that the Snow Tex will hold it in place once it’s dry.

Here’s the other side. I used a skinny stick to push the snow up beyond the edge of the path, to look like it’s been shoveled. The shovel is made by Island Crafts and I made the snowman. Again, I didn’t use glue… fingers crossed the hardened snow will hold them in place.

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