My Early Christmas Present

While The Little Dude was on vacation with Granny and Grandpa, The Husband and I set about redoing the framing around two large windows in our dining room area.  When we first moved in, they had cigarette smoke stained shutters on them which I promptly removed, cleaned and spray painted orange.  It looked pretty cool for a little while actually, but then I got a little tired of looking at all that orange and knowing in the back of my head that the shutters were just covering up the messed up window frames.  So The Husband and I hot in gear and actually finished a project in two days!  That's a first for us.  So now we had these beautiful looking windows, but the whole wall was looking naked without the big pop of color from the orange shutters.  That was when I started to obsess about finding a map.  A BIG one.  This is what we found:

It is a vintage political/physical map of obviously the US, but South America is sneakily hiding behind there too!  I'm kind of a geography dork (kind of a dork in general really) so it totally makes me smile to see it.  Not only is it adding color to a naked area, we are learning when we look at it!  And The Little Dude is going to grow up looking at it.  For that reason, I decided not to get a vintage world map because I didn't want him telling his teacher one day that what she was pointing at is not Russia, but The USSR!  

Also, what do you think of my little table display?  That tube in the middle is a Pyrex Bake n' Round full of the Shiny Brites that didn't make it to the booth.  The candy cane place mats were made by yours truly last year with that stiff felt you can get at the craft store.  Everything but the little trains (they came from this etsy shop here) was thrifted.  

In other news, my booth is doing really well!  I'm selling Christmas ornaments like crazy.  And my mall has this great system now that sends out an email at the end of the night with a sales report. This is really cool because now I don't have to go in and figure out what I need to restock, then go back home and get it.  I know ahead of time, and that I think is going to be hugely helpful.  How is everyone else doing in your booths or online shops?   Is the holiday season treating you well?

Linking up with The Colorado Lady for Vintage Thingie Thursday and My Romantic Home for Show and Tell Friday.