A Very Merry Mani

Hoo baby, we’re in the holiday soup now – it’s the final weekend before the Christmas holidays, and the festive is about to go. off.  Like most folks, I’ve got a lot of social engagements over the coming days, and time has gone all whackeroo.  I swear it was the beginning of the month just last week (it has been, as Counting Crows might say, a very long December.)

I’m actually feeling pretty neutral about the holidays; relaxed to a fault, even.  Save a few stocking stuffery-type things, Mr. Finger Candy and I have no gifts for one another.  It’s kind of a bummer not having pretty presents wrapped up under the tree, but not remotely a bummer when you consider that instead of jewelry or video games or a new coffee maker (shame that, as we kind of need one) we’re gifting ourselves with another trip to Disney World in February of the new year.

Last weekend we hosted my husband’s family for our annual Christmas get-together, and then tonight my mom and dad are hosting another family event that is sure to leave us all desperately wishing for Santa to bring us pants with elasticized waistbands, because my mom does not know the meaning of the word “moderation” when it comes to a holiday meal; if you don’t stagger from the house (with leftovers!) offhandedly contemplating a wee pit stop at the emergency room, she has apparently failed as a mother. 😉

Then this weekend we’ll be dropping in on our friends’ holiday open house, where we always have a nice time catching up with folks we haven’t seen in years.  And speaking of, I’ll be capping off the Christmas social season with an evening in the company of some ladies I’ve known since high school (and in a couple of cases, beyond.)  We try to get together every Christmas, for brunch, or drinks at the pub, or this crazy random party we attend every year that brings out our very best-worst impulses to overindulge and spaz out on the dance floor to the Beasties and the Wu.  Okay, so I actually really love that part. 😉

So we’ve got lots of fun stuff coming up this week, and I’m sure that will pull me out of this neutral zone of disinterest that I’ve been occupying since the beginning of the month.  And I really hope it does, because so far the only thing about the holidays I’ve actually been able to fully get behind is our Christmas tree – I think this year’s edition is perhaps the nicest one I’ve ever decorated.  I’m so glad I put it up early so the Weege could have a chance to loaf beneath its twinkling lights; she loved the Christmas tree.

I’ve spoken about my tree before – it’s 15 artificial years old this Christmas, and we have history.  As in I have been electrocuted twice whilst lighting it, plus all of the bottom branches are broken, so a full quarter of the tree is held up by, well, itself.  And one year I really super overdid it on the twinkle lights (2,100 of them; how proud Clark Griswold would have been) and nearly suffered a nervous breakdown for my efforts.  These days I stick to a much more manageable 600 or so.

And with the exception of maybe a dozen or so ornaments, every decoration on this tree is of something edible – fast food, candy, baked goods and other sweets.  It’s such a beautiful tree, and every year it proves to be just about my favourite thing about the holidays.

I purchased a great load of these ornaments over 15 years ago at a 75% off sale at a local Christmas shop, but we’ve amassed far more since as gifts (nearly every one of those Starbucks ornaments) and random retail finds.  My favourites include a glittery glass t-bone, The Christmas Pickle, and that wee rasher of bacon dangling tantalizingly over the photo of our cat, Weegie.  New additions this year include some squashy – yes, squashy! – cupcake and donut ornaments, the cool pewter ornament we got at the Jingle Bell, Jingle Bam dessert party at Disney, and two small photo tributes to our dearly missed kitties, Weegie and Porky.

And because it’s just what I do (or it’s what I did – I really have no idea what this blog is about any more) I whipped up a glittery Christmas mani inspired by my tree, nail charm ornaments and all.  It’s a whole lot of high maintenance look, but then again, so is the tree!  Here I paired those little charms (from Daily Charme, all) with KB Shimmer’s Get Clover It.  Very merry, indeed. 🙂

Tree Time!

I put up our tree today!  This is exclamation mark worthy because I’m never so seasonally motivated, particularly when it comes to our tree (we have history.)  But we’ve got some fun things planned for later on this holiday season that require a bit of planning right now, and so that’s what I’m doing.

Also, I woke up this morning just feeling festive!  So much so, I managed to convince my husband to watch Babes in Toyland, a favourite terrible Christmas movie from my childhood starring Keanu Reeves and Drew Barrymore, while I melted some Christmas Wish-scented wax (pine, peppermint and cookies) and painted my nails with this festive glitter bomb, KB Shimmer’s sELFie.  This polish looks so pretty on its own, but I love it topped with this tiny bejeweled nail charm.

These sort of ultra dense, glitter-packed polishes always look fantastic in super macro close-up, and sELFie is no exception – lovely!  A fun and festive mani for a fun and festive day.

Such Charming Trees!

Look at me, making great use out of the assortment of holiday-themed nail charms my husband sensibly gave me before the big day, because blogging. 🙂 He is so wise sometimes!  And so was I for pairing these charms with KB Shimmer’s All Decked Out, a once-a-Christmas polish that I like more in theory than in practice.  It’s weirdly muddy (it’s the dark green moss jelly; it dulls the rainbow glitter) and benefits greatly from a bit of added shimmer.

Making Christmas

With one week to go until the big day and a gargantuan snowstorm due to blow through the area tomorrow, it’s really beginning to look a lot like Christmas.  Living in a condo apartment, we don’t have a ton of available space in which to decorate (to say nothing of the storage situation, which is tight) but I always see to setting out my favourites, including my (nearly) all-food ornament tree, a 14-year-old artificial beast that has claimed my sanity on more than one occasion, and very nearly my life the year I loaded it with 2,100 mini twinkle lights, one of which broke and electrocuted me.  For a couple of hours afterwards I swore I could taste the colour purple.  Ah, holiday memories!

This is also the second year I’m setting out the holiday menagerie, including Fritz the Mouse Doorstop, a Christmastime critter that has been making the rounds in my family for the past 25 years.  In this photo you can also see my first planned renovation project of 2017 – painting those stairs (also ripping out the bathroom, but one step – wah-waaaahhhhhh – at a time, yeah?)

The diningroom chandelier, a gigantic wrought iron thing that would not look entirely out of place on Game of Thrones (maybe without the twee shades), gets hung with sparkly baubles.

Speaking of sparkle in the diningroom, in the centre of the table I always place my snowflake tealight holders, this year up on one of my ubiquitous cake trays alongside a super glittery three-wick candle holder from Bath and Body Works.  Candle options vary, but at the moment I’m burning White Barn’s Peppermint Marshmallow, and it smells amazing!

And finally, for the first time in too many years, I set up my Christmas Town, a much smaller affair than my Halloween Town that my husband and I have dubbed Electric Gay Discoville on account of all the swirling rainbow fiber optics, and the fact that the only female figurine in town had no head straight out of the box. No, seriously, look at this over on the right of the tree – this is how she came, factory direct, and she’s the only lady in town!  You know, we never did find her head…

Yup, RGDVille is a total sausage fest, and that’s just how the residents (and I) like it!

So there we have it, friends, some of the festive decorating that’s lighting up my life.  I hope however you’ve decorated your homes (or not; Festivus is totally a thing) it’s added tons of sparkle and joy to your holidays. 🙂

Christmas Trees: A Tutorial

Easy, glittery trees, the Finger Candy way!

Step 1: (We can have lots of fun!)  Paint your nails to opacity with two polishes, a simple dark creme on your middle two fingers (this can be any shade you’d like, although I like the tree detailing as against this basic black) and a festive glitter bomb on your index and pinkie fingers, here KB Shimmer’s sELFie.  Once dry, top with a layer of quick dry topcoat.

Step 2: (There’s so much we can do!  Okay, I’ll stop with the NKOTB jokes now.)  Apply striping tape to your two middle fingers in the shape of a wide chevron from the centre of your cuticles down to the edges of your nails. Don’t worry if the small point up at your cuticles doesn’t come together perfectly – you’ll be adding a tiny little star charm at the end that will cover up any boo-boos.

Step 3: Fill in the taped-off space on your two middle fingers with a Christmas tree green polish, here Enchanted Polish’s Lost Boy.  Depending on the polish you choose for your index and pinkie fingers, you may be able to use it (skipping over step 3 entirely.)  But super thick glitter bombs like sELFie can be difficult to wrangle in nail art, and are best used as megawatt accent polishes over a complimentary-hued base.

Step 4: Top the now-green trees with two light coats of the glitter polish.  Or omit this step altogether because the polish you chose for the trees covered it up just well enough in the first place, thankyouverymuch.

Step 5: Once dry, carefully remove the striping tape, pat down any errant bits of glitter with the point of a toothpick and top with another layer of quick dry top coat.

Step 6: With the topcoat still tacky, place a star upon the highest bough of each of your trees, here a couple of little golden charms I purchased from Daily Charme.  You could also paint on your stars using yellow polish and a small detail brush, or do what I did last year and fish all the golden stars out of another bottle of polish and top your tree designs with those!

Et voila, glittery Christmas trees, if you please.  I hope you find this tutorial helpful. 🙂

Blue Spruce

And so here we are at the end of the year, celebrating the final day of December and indeed the entire Year 2015 with one final Enchanted mystery polish, blue spruce-hued December 2015.  I had a feeling that December was going to be a Christmas tree-type green.  The only other green of the year was a pale, watery mint in March; we were overdue for something rich and festive.

Like every other mystery polish released this year, December 2015 is a beautiful holographic shot through with colour-bending shimmer.  The ultra fine gold shimmer running throughout December 2015 is particularly lovely, mingling with the Kelly green base to produce a gentle blue hue that reminds me of blue spruce trees.  The holographic effect in this polish is also spectacular, although that’s really no surprise – a beautiful, dark holo like this one was meant to dazzle, and dazzle it does.

But stain it does not!  Because this time – unlike that time with Colors by Llarowe’s grass green holo, Gemini Rising – I remembered to lay down two thick coats of base coat so I don’t have to walk around for the next month with pee green nails.  See, kids, we’re learnin’!

How Much Tree is Too Much Tree?

Say, six tree-centric manicures in a month?  Because I’m averaging five, and that doesn’t seem excessive AT ALL.  But I love holiday-hued glitters, and I apparently also love green polishes – betwixt the two, you will always find your nails most closely resembling a Christmas tree.

Working from top to bottom, we first have KB Shimmer’s moss green holiday polish, All Decked Out.

Next up we have another KB Shimmer polish, this time sELFie, a megawatt micro glitter that looks like crushed up ornaments for your nails.

Third time’s a charm with Colors by Llarowe’s grass green Gemini Rising topped with Whimsical Ideas by Pam’s Festivus glitter topper (Festivus itself involving an altogether different kind of “tree.”)

Next we have an ode to artificial holiday greenery in the form of Smitten Polish’s nuclear green Not Your Mama’s Easter Grass topped with my all time favourite polish, Candy Lacquer’s Candy Cane Fiesta.

And finally, we have a holiday mani for the Disney fan, a combination of Pure Ice’s Lucky Charming topped with Sally Hansen’s Over the Rainblue and another Whimsical polish, All Ears.

The Perfect Tree For Me

Eleven or maybe even 12 years ago when my husband (then-fiancé) and I were preparing to celebrate our first Christmas together, we went out and bought a quite large and impressively bushy artificial tree that has not, wonder of wonders, succumbed to my more destructive tendencies and continues to stand proudly in the corner of our livingroom every December. It’s my favourite thing about the holidays, and though I absolutely dread putting the thing up (the first year it took me two solid days and a small nervous breakdown) because I invariably harm myself in the process (one year I electrocuted myself on a broken bulb and every year my hands break out into a weird, itchy rash because I am thoroughly allergic to manhandling its plasticiness), I would not care to celebrate Christmas without it.

Besides, our tree is FUN. Look at this thing! With very few exceptions (a Jack Skellington ornament here, a little fox there) all of our ornaments are food and candy-themed, and the whole tree is draped in garland that looks like hard candy, gumdrops, candy corn and peppermints! Buddy the Elf would definitely approve!

I’ve done a few Christmas tree-type nail designs over the last couple of seasons, but I wanted to try something more personal. And so I took the macro approach to my own Christmas tree and focused in on all that fun candied garland against a backdrop of glimmering artificial tree (KB Shimmer’s Get Clover It) and tiny twinkling lights. O Christmas tree, indeed!

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

I know all you Americans are coming down off (or coming back up out of) major gravy-based comas and/or recuperating from injuries sustained during the Battle of Black Friday, and so the upcoming holiday season is probably the furthest thing from your minds, but here in Canada we’ve been good to go since the middle of November (and if you’re a major retailer like, say, craft store Michael’s, who in recent years have pushed their “holiday” season into groundbreaking and obscene new territories, it’s more like late August.) I hung our outdoor lights a few weeks back and I’ll be digging the tree out of storage this weekend, so I’d say this Christmas thing is pretty well on.

And on my nails as well, where a pond manicure Christmas tree design meets a favourite glitter jelly, KB Shimmer’s Get Clover It, and two different Sally Hansen glitters, Strawberry Shields and Over the Rainblue. Quite festive.

What’s Old is New Again

As part of their winter 2014 collection, indie polish maker KB Shimmer re-released a handful of crowd pleasers from last year’s holiday collection. The ghosts of nail polishes past, if you will. I held out last year, not yet fully comprehending the meaning of the term “limited edition” as it applies to the world of nail polish (also known as “Get it now, now, NOW because in two days it’ll be gone forever and you’ll regret it, and oh lord, this is so stupid, it’s nail polish, but you should get it now, now, NOW because…” Repeat ad nauseam.) But liking last year’s polishes more than this year’s, I decided to concentrate my purchasing power on the re-releases, which nicely complement one of KB’s wintery polishes from last year that I already own.

First up we have All Decked Out, a mix of rainbow hex glitter and gold star glitter in a moss green jelly base that I refer to as “Christmas tree in a blender.” That description is actually pretty apt.

Next is Snow Much Fun, a fun, frosty-looking polish from last year that never actually seemed to leave the regular rotation. This is another one I have a cute little name for, this one being “Frozen in a bottle” (all fun trademark infringement aside, with its icy blue base, tiny holographic sparkles and sweet little snowflake glitter, this polish could be the official nail lacquer of Arendelle.)

Third in line is another re-release, this one being the ultra girly Merry Pinkmas. I love its super colourful palette of glitter against the neon baby pink base. The whole thing resembles my dream Christmas tree (a pink tree covered in ornaments the colour of this glitter mix, simply enough. Although not so simply, as pink Christmas trees are a thing that just don’t seem to exist. Merry Pinkmas will have to do for now.)

Finally, we have Snow Way!, a baby blue polish sprinkled with different sizes of white hex glitter and holographic micro glitter. This one reminds me of those furious little snowstorms that spin themselves out of nothingness on otherwise crystal clear, blue-skied days.

KB Shimmer’s polishes are available through their own website, but if you’re a Canuk like me, I’ll direct you to Harlow & Co.‘s site for all your KB needs, which, based on these fun polishes, could be considerable!