Urn Christmas Tree… the How To
Gorgeous Christmas trees in urns, while not a new look, seem to have made a resurgence in the past few years. This one below is my absolute favorite…
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| Canadian House & Home |
I have been wanting to recreate one of these trees, but could never figure out how they made the large trees stable enough. After looking through the web, the only tutorial I found was through eHow. They said to fill the urn with sand or gravel & then put the tree in… That might work for a little 3′ tree, but I was not going to trust that method with a full size tree. Bound & determined this year, we figured out a relatively easy solution for our fake tree.
What you’ll need:
Fake Christmas Tree with a hollow pole (most bottom sections are hollow)
Wooden Dowel that is just smaller in diameter than your tree pole (ours was 4′ tall)
Concrete Urn
Quikrete Concrete
Large Bucket (to stir the concrete)
Shovel
Water
Garbage Bag
First step, find your ideal urn. We were lucky enough to find ours on clearance at The Home Depot for $43 this past weekend. This thing is seriously heavy. Thank you to the gentlemen at Home Depot that helped me get it down & into the car.
Fill the urn with a standard garbage bag. This step could be skipped, but we wanted the option to take the concrete out after the season was over.
In a large bucket, stir up your Quikrete according to the package directions using your shovel & water.
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Once combined, place your wooden dowel into the urn & scoop your concrete around it. Use a level to make sure this sucker is straight. There will be no shifting after it’s dry.
After a few hours, once the concrete is dry, simply slide the metal pole of your tree over the wooden dowel. We ended up trimming off a few inches of the dowel to accommodate for the second tier of the tree to go on. And actually, we only used the top two tiers of our existing tree as the original height at 9′ would not have fit with the urn. 5.5′ tall was our ideal tree height plus the urn.
To cover the garbage bag & concrete we used a little reindeer moss.
Now completely solid & standing tall, our tree is all ready to get dressed up for the Christmas season. And when the Holidays are over we’ll simply pull the concrete lollipop out & save it until next year. Allowing us to use the urn for Spring & Summer flowers.
On an “It’s too early to put that thing up” note… I agree. Tradition in our home has always been that it goes up on Thanksgiving day. But as this was a new experiment we had to try it out early. Since it was so successful, I thought I’d share it with you all too. So now you have plenty of time to get your materials together for the 2012 Holidays!
No ornaments will be touching our tree until Turkey Day!!
xo-
LOVE this look! Great idea – takes the tree to a whole new level. Literally and figuratively. π
LOVE, love, love! I would have never thought to do this. Thanks for sharing!
Great tutorial. As always the instructions + pictures make re-creating very easy.
http://girlfrombk.blogspot.com/
Very clever! Thanks for the tip!
That beats a tree skirt. Not a big fan of the skirts, but I can get on board with that. Thanks for the tutorial π xo Kristin
Genius idea, again! Can't wait to see it all styled up in a little over a week…yikes!
love it! my sister did this last year but she forgot the step of adding the plastic-so her urn in unusable other than Christmas. Question-what size tree did you use in this one?
Thanks everyone!
Amanda, it ended up being around 6'tall from the bottom branch to the top & around 34" in diameter.
I've always loved the classic elegance of a tree in an urn and I think this is a much more practical tree to live with if you have crawling infants or kids in general who frolic on the floor, not to mention puppy dogs. I still remember what happened when I was vacuuming once and caught the tree skirt in the vacuum, oh my, that wouldn't happen with the urn tree π Thanks for posting this early to get us thinking about it.
You know, since my kids started pre-school and bringing home fall/thanksgiving crafts, we started a new tradition of the Thanksgiving Tree. We'd put it up the weekend after Halloween, and hang up all of their crafts from previous years, as well as new ones that we do at home each year. The boys love seeing their special things on a tree, and it reminds us of the things we are thankful for, all month long. Not to mention getting some more use out of that fake tree!
Love the urn idea. I've got 20' ceilings, and I already put my tree up on top of a table. This might give me just a bit more to keep the 3-year old and cat out of my pretties!
Ya know, this might actually work for a real tree too.
Instead of a dowell in the center of the concrete, put an empty can down in the middle of the concrete.
The opening of the can should be 4-6" in diameter depending on how big of a tree you usually have. The weight of the urn and the concrete combined should be enough to support the tree as long as the base of the tree fits rather snugly in the can.
Water would have to be added frequently due to the lack of large reservour unless you have room in the bottom for those gels that are used in potting mix.
It might work for a tree up to about 6'???
Oh my god, this is an incredible idea. So doing this!
Thank you, thank you, thank you π
xx Alex
How do you dispose of a big hunk of concrete after Christmas. I doubt the trash guys would pickup a tree like this.
You store it for the next year.