December 1st - The Actual Tree

For my daughter's Harry Potter Christmas tree advent calendar, of course she had to get the actual Christmas tree on December 1st.

The tree is an artificial spruce, 120 cm tall with 100 LED-lights pre-attached.
That exact tree can be bought online here in Norway, but it costs nearly a 100 US $. Obviously (in Snape's voice), I was very happy to discover that I could have the tree for free - as a welcome gift if I joined a book club for a year. I didn't even have to buy anything, just cancel their subscription package once every three weeks or so. I already started planning this advent calendar last December, so my book club year is almost up!

Normally, in my opinion a Christmas tree should be a real live Norwegian spruce (obviously, since I live in Norway), relatively freshly cut, and our family tree is always a live spruce. But they only last for a couple of weeks before all the needles start to fall off, and because this is a 24 day advent calendar, I opted for an artificial tree. When she gets her own place, of course she's free to get a live spruce whenever she wants.

The tree itself actually looks quite OK, it doesn't scream ARTIFICIAL! from afar. I wasn't particularly happy with the tree stand, though, it's very ugly and really gives away the fact that this is a fake tree. So I found inspiration over at EPBOT, an awesome, geeky, fandom craft blog run by some truly brilliant crafters. They have their very own Harry Potter Christmas tree and has provided me with lots of inspiration for this project. They have made a stunning witch's cauldron to place their tree in, so of course I had to try something similar! I did this around Halloween, and to save myself the time and effort of making my own cauldron, I bought a plastic Halloween decorational pot on eBay (please note that links may expire with time, and they will unfortunately not ble fixed or updated). Not at all as nice as the EPBOT one, but a lot less work.

I did something very similar to the EPBOT-folks for the actual tree stand inside the cauldron. I had my husband make a circular wooden plate fitting the bottom of the cauldron. We drilled a hole in the middle of both the wooden disc and the bottom of the pot. The inside of the pot had a very uneven bottom, so I had to glue several small, flat pieces of wood to the cauldron bottom in order to make a level base for the wooden disc. We then fitted a 17 cm piece of 2x2" plank to hold the "stem" of the tree, and drilled a 24 mm wide, 13 cm deep hole down the middle, plus a much smaller hole up the middle from the other side to guide the screw coming through the wooden disc. Finally we applied glue everywhere and screwed the disc and the wooden piece together through the bottom of the cauldron (from the underside). We spray painted the wooden parts black-ish after they were screwed into place, although it surely would have been much better to do that before final assembly (note to self).

The whole thing was still very light, though, so to eliminate the danger of the tree tipping over, I first thought about putting in some heavy rocks. I actually ended up pouring some concrete that I happened to find lying around into the pot, the most stable and permanent solution in my opinion.

Just like the EPBOT-people, I put a cardboard disc on top and covered that with fibre fill to make it look like smoke or maybe snow. I even added some glitter hairspray as a final touch. Now felt that I had a good base for a good looking Harry Potter themed Christmas tree!

This gift was of course way too big to be wrapped and hung from the Advent Calendar Branch, so I made a note with a little hint to help my daughter locate the actual gift, and wrapped that in a small box that went on the branch.

Here's a couple of shots showing the tree in her room, In the back of course you see Hedwig, and how the Advent Calendar displays in the dark. I think it's gorgeous!

 Please come back tomorrow for the first Harry Potter themed Christmas Ornament!