Vintage Christmas Paper Chain Garland

Little by little I’ve been chipping away at getting the house decorated for Christmas. I like to have carols playing in the background to keep me in the mood while working. I also light an evergreen candle to bring the sensory experience full circle. We set up the tree a couple days ago and the first piece of adornment was a vintage Christmas paper chain garland that I made from a kit.

This year marks a new look for the Christmas tree. I replaced all my colorful vintage ornaments with gold, silver, and white ones. Rather than use a red bead chain for garland, I created one with vintage looking paper.

I always loved making Christmas paper chains out of red and green construction paper in grade school. I wanted to make them for our tree at home, but Mom always said, “It doesn’t go with our tree.” Which it didn’t. We always had a very formal tree – nine to ten foot tall live tree that was fully flocked and loaded with ornate ornaments.

So … now that I’m all grown up I decided it was finally time to make a Christmas paper chain for my own tree!

I found a beautiful vintage paper chain garland kit with pre-cut card stock strips, which saved a ton of time! I bought enough to loop our tree several times.

I used my hot glue gun to secure the strips together. You could use a glue stick, but I like the speed of working with the gun. Just be careful not to burn yourself when using the gun.

Start gluing interlocking circles together to make the chain. You could easily make your own strips with scrapbook paper, but it will take more time to cut the strips and scallop the edges.

Some of the strips have descriptive sentences about a snowman.

And some have bars of music from Jingle Bells.

I love the way my vintage Christmas paper chain garland looks on my frosted tree with its new mercury glass ornaments.

The tree is dotted with a few new feathered friends too. I’ll give a full reveal of this year’s Christmas tree in my holiday home tour on December 2nd. Can’t wait to show you!

Do you adorn your tree with garland?

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