Nest wishes!

It was three weeks ago, I think, when my husband and I were looking at holiday wreaths and he said something like "Why spend so much money on a wreath when we have all those evergreens at home?" I pointed out that I didn't have the time or ability to make a wreath, and he said, "How difficult could it be?"

So I bought a big red bow ($2.95) and set him loose. For a while we had a pile of miscellaneous evergreen limbs on the front porch--pine, cedar, hemlock, holly--and then I came home one day and found that some of the limbs had been wired into a sort of vaguely wreath-like shape. 

Then we went away for a week, and since wreaths don't make themselves, we came home to find that same agglomeration of miscellaneous misshapen greenery on the porch.

"Next year I'll just buy a wreath," I declared with a harrumph, but perhaps I spoke too soon. This morning my multi-talented husband beat that mess into shape, wired on the bow, and inserted the centerpiece: a tiny bird's nest attached to a delicate Y-shaped limb.

Next year I'll let my husband make me a wreath again.