A truly magical chandelier floral arrangement
Full of greenery, cascading flowers, and twinkling lights—this statement floral centerpiece will take your breath away.
When I started Rue Noelle last month, my brain was overflowing with ideas. It has been fun to let them slowly marinate and evolve. One of the first and most tangible, exciting ideas that Tommy and I had was to collaborate with his mom, my mother-in-law, Maureen Christmas. Maureen is a floral designer based in Massachusetts—her company is called Floral Notes—and her work is stunning. She creates true works of art, follow the link and see for yourself!
Maureen has done flowers for the Dalai Lama. Her work has graced museums like the Boston Museum of Fine Art. She did the flowers for our wedding and countless others. She participates in and judges flower shows. She travels the world both to learn and teach techniques. She has a long list of accolades and certifications. Tommy and I once “modeled” flowers for her during a floral conference in Boston. Though we were aware of how talented Maureen is, it was beyond impressive to see the huge crowd she was instructing—pen and paper in audience members’ hands furiously taking notes—as we walked across the stage literally wearing her floral designs.
I love having flowers and greens around the house and take great pleasure in putting together my own little arrangements, well aware that I have no idea what I’m doing but am very happy putting together something that brings me joy. Whenever Maureen would travel to see us, I remember gazing at my suddenly feeble looking arrangements and thinking, well… this is going to get ripped to shreds. Having someone who is a true subject matter expert look at your work changes your own lens preemptively. This is true in both work and at home.
However, Maureen taught us what it looks like to not just be a true expert but a true artist. Instead of coming to our home and looking at flowers we’d put together with a critical eye, changing them or telling us what we’d done wrong, she encouraged us. I remember asking her for feedback and she’d say something like, “no, this is great. It’s all about what you love.”
That’s what true artistry should be about, I’ve realized. We’ve all experienced someone giving us unsolicited criticism over some aspect of our lives. How you parent, how you feed your kids, how you spend your time, how you spend your money, how you decorate your house, anything. Sometimes that unsolicited critic is in our own mind. But a true artist encourages. They understand the magic of creating and the beauty in finding what speaks to your soul, translating that into an art form, and how powerful it is when you are the one making those discoveries. So rather than impose their idea of how something should look, they encourage you, empower you, and inspire you.
So for that, Maureen, I thank you.
Despite all of that—I know what a wealth of knowledge experts and artists hold. Their minds are like treasure troves, years of experience lived and knowledge gathered. Being an extremely curious person and a dreamer, aware of this in-depth floral knowledge my mother-in-law has, and knowing that I was on the cusp of starting my own little company, an idea came to me to see if Maureen would be up for gifting us with some of her knowledge. She was!
The goal for this series partnering with Maureen is to help myself and anyone interested increase their floral knowledge and abilities. Maureen has so many tips and tricks, and as with many skills learned in life, some things that seem impossible to achieve from the outside can actually be achieved when you break them down into simple steps. Personally, I’d love to increase the tools I have on hand at home for simple but more elevated arrangements, understand how to incorporate things I have in my home or can find in my backyard, and create some beautiful arrangements. I hope that some of you out there are excited about this, too!
I feel so lucky that Maureen is sharing her knowledge. For this first piece, Maureen and I went back and forth with ideas and she came up with this magical piece. She walked us through step by step, gave an overview of tools to use (most can be substituted with things you likely already have!), and sent plenty of photos and videos to help guide us, as well as live tips on FaceTime. In the post below, I’ve included photos of us creating our arrangements in our home as well as the photos she used too, since she created this for her own Christmas table.
I had intended to get this on the blog sooner but time slips away faster than you think in mid-to-late December so here we are on Christmas eve, my favorite day of the year. A fire is crackling, I’ve got a plate of Christmas cookies and mug of hot tea, and my soul is content. I hope yours is too and for those who celebrate, Merry Christmas Eve.
xo,
Shannon
A Magical Holiday Floral Centerpiece for your Chandelier
Floral arrangement designed by: Maureen Christmas, AIFD, CFD, EMC, of Floral Notes
Written and photographed by: Shannon Christmas (no acronyms), of Noelle, L.L.C.
It’s the holiday season. Today is, in fact, Christmas Eve, and if you celebrate, your home is likely in its peak state of decoration. Christmas trees, wreaths, garlands on banisters, garlands over windows, string lights twinkling. You might be feeling like your home is full to burst with holiday cheer and festive decorations. We felt that way, but we made room for one more—actually, two—and wow, what they’ve added to our decor. When Maureen of Floral Notes and I chatted about what I was dreaming for this, I knew I wanted something Christmas-y but elevated, and something that we could all create at home learning simple techniques as we grow our knowledge. Maureen absolutely delivered and somehow found a surface in our home that was not yet covered in greens or decor: our chandeliers. This design can be placed on pendant lights or chandeliers.
We hang little ornaments from some of our pendants, and of course you may have mistletoe hanging. But I hadn’t thought about greenery on chandeliers, let alone greenery with twinkling lights and cascading flowers. Read on below for instructions on how to create this in your own home. It doesn’t take long to make (truly!), was a lot of fun to put together, and is something you could probably pull off this evening or on Christmas Day just in time for a special Christmas meal. Or, create it for your New Years festivities.
Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions on how to execute this. We’d love to see your own creations. Now let’s make something full of magic and beauty!
Note: we created and photographed two versions of this in our own home, and Maureen created a version as well, taking photographs along the way to teach us. I’ll include photos from both homes and try to note whose is whose :)
Please enjoy the spaceship our elf Marvin was flying on a few mornings ago
Equipment
Curly willow or other long, slim branches. We used long, thin bendable branches harvested from a currently leafless tall bush in our backyard, and they worked great! Maureen used curly willow. You can also substitute any long thin sticks / branches you can find in your backyard
Bind wire (paper covered wire) by Smithers-Oasis. Maureen confirmed that jute, wool or string can also work
Branches of greenery (Maureen used Carolina Sapphire greens and highly recommends, we used something evergreen—who knows), harvested from your backyard or bought from a store. We used a big armful for ours to create two chandelier pieces.
Toothpicks
Battery pack string lights
Flowers—a few stems of the following flower(s). The quantity depends on the look you’re going for! Could be as simple as 3 stems, or more for a more maximalist look
Amaryllis: these flowers have a long, hollow stem that make them perfect for this project. I found amaryllis in random grocery stores both in bulb form (I cut them right off of the bulb) and in long stem form.
Other flowers that could work: tulips, calla lilies. I also tacked on a few other flowers that probably won’t last long, but I can easily untack them.
Flowers should last for a few days at least, and you can always change them out when they start to wilt.
Squeeze Plant Water Bottle. When Maureen sent a picture of this, the first thing that came to my mind was my post-partum peri bottle and I truly pulled it out of storage to use. Luckily I found the correct bottle at a florist shop, but a peri bottle probably would have worked fine! Maureen said that a turkey baster works here, too. This is how you’ll get water into the hollow stems of your upside-down flowers hanging from your greenery.
Optional: if you can’t find flowers that will work, you can also use other things to decorate.
Wired ribbon is an example Maureen gave, you can have them curled and draping down from the greenery. You can even pair ribbon with the fresh flowers, too. Experiment!
Maureen added Harry Potter floating candles to her display and they’re magical! How fun for kids (and grown-ups) to use the wand to turn these on and off on Christmas. If we have time to find and do this with ours, we might too. Lots of room with this to get creative with things you could hang from this!
The first step depends on your chandelier. Our chandelier had a nice layer that we could lie the branches right on top, so we bundled our branches together, tying in the center with your bind wire (or twine / jute / wool). You want the branches to be splaying out at different angles rather than all sitting parallel to one another, to create an interesting shape when you place the greenery. Once we had created our bundle, we placed onto our chandelier and moved the branches around a bit to achieve an interesting shape.
Maureen’s chandelier was such that she couldn’t lie the branches flat, so instead, she placed the branches onto the chandelier first, and then tied the ends together with bind wire.
Nest or nestle your greenery on top of the branches. In our home, we rested the greenery right on top of the bundled branches. Maureen wove her greenery into the branches. You want to have enough greenery to mostly cover the branches. Arrange the greenery to your liking.
Maureen’s chandelier and gorgeous Carolina Sapphire greens
Trim your flowers as needed so that they can be cascading at the appropriate length. For the chandelier in our foyer, we made sure they wouldn’t be too in the way of people walking. Over a table, trim so they are a nice length but not touching the table. You can hold the flowers upside down before trimming to give yourself an idea of a length that looks good to you.
Add your battery pack string lights and spread the lights throughout the greenery. You can do this later, too.
About an inch or two from the bottom of the stem, slide a toothpick through the stem.
Twist your bind wire, jute, twine, or wool around the toothpick. Wrap the wire around the stem and both toothpicks to give it a good, strong anchor. Leave some room at both ends of the wire and tie them together with a knot directly hovering over the hollow opening of the stem. This way, the flower will hang straight.
Here are Maureen’s helpful photos of this process:
Tie the flower to a strong branch or even part of the chandelier if it’s concealed.
Repeat with other flowers until you have the arrangement you’re looking for. We pinned other, smaller flowers right to the amaryllis stem rather than using more bind wire.
Flower show judge note #1: “You’ll find using a minimum of 3 flowers/groups of varying lengths and not all on the same plane to be visually pleasing.”
Flower show judge note #2: “It’s good to try to hide the mechanics.” When you’re done wiring the flowers and before or even after hanging them (that’s us, we didn’t do this at first!), you can trim the toothpicks so that you can’t see the hanging mechanism.
Maureen’s styling. How magical with the snowy background!
Use your squeeze bottle (or peri bottle or baster!) to squeeze water into the stem of the flowers.
Step back and admire. This is stunning during the daytime, and when night descends and rooms darken, this twinkles with magic and whimsy. We absolutely love it and hope you do, too!
I don’t know about you, but I already feel like I know more simply using the phrase “bind wire”.
Have a very merry, magical Christmas to all who celebrate.
Hot chocolate brownie cookies and a quick trip down memory lane
Just in time for Christmas: an old favorite cookie recipe resurrected
Just in time for Christmas: an old favorite cookie recipe resurrected
7 years ago, I created a cookie recipe that honored my lifelong love of hot chocolate. Sort of a brownie, sort of a cookie, full of hot cocoa trimmings—I loved this cookie.
One of my sisters recently asked if I still had the recipe. Digging through archived PDFs from my old blog was like reading an old diary, a time capsule from a different phase of life. On 12/17/2018, the date I posted this recipe, Tommy and I were newlyweds living in downtown Boston with one of our dogs, Ghost. It’s always funny to think back on how we spent our time before having kids—hard to precisely pinpoint and yet you typically felt busy. Everything is relative, isn’t it. We both worked long hours for the same company. Outside of work, the memories that come to mind are exploring Boston’s restaurants, having friends and family over for parties, walking Ghost in search of small patches of grass (I don’t miss that), obsessing over Game of Thrones, cooking, baking, reading physical books (I am eternally grateful for audiobooks, without which I’d never be able to keep up with as much reading as I used to), driving up north to ski, and doing puzzles—endless puzzles.
How you allot your time shifts during life. That’s normal. And while my surroundings look quite different today, I can’t help but sit here and feel that while so much can change, some things don’t change much at all. As I hover in the mental state that exists somewhere between the fog of a week-and-a-half long (and counting) relentless barage of viruses and the dazzling joy and excitement that comes in the days leading up to Christmas, I feel the space-time continuum bend just a bit (or, I like to think I do). Maybe it’s the fog, maybe it’s the excitement, or maybe it’s just simply sitting at a computer and writing, but it’s me—still me, just a girl who loves hot chocolate.
I can see 10-year-old me making hot chocolate with free Swiss Miss packets in the kitchen of my dad’s downtown Boston office on weekends. 16-year-old me making batches of hot chocolate for family using our beloved (and sadly, retired) Cocomotion machine. There’s 22-year-old me, now working in the same office as my dad, making the same hot chocolate in the same kitchens all of those years later. 27-year-old me dreaming up this recipe in my Boston apartment and writing a blog post about it. 34-year-old me sitting here recreating the recipe and reminiscing, while drinking hot chocolate almost daily with my kids*.
Okay, back to the present and off of memory lane. There’s something about the Christmas spirit and scents of the season that truly stirs up your nostalgia.
Wishing you all a healthy, merry and delicious Christmas.
xo,
Shannon
P.S. - to anyone who read my blog before, or this recipe in particular, I included a few tweaks to both style and steps. Hope you enjoy!
*Note: it feels important to point out that we have identified a “healthier” hot chocolate but still mix in good old Swiss Miss. Having kids really makes you re-evaluate ingredient labels! Also, with the retirement of our old Cocomotion machine, we now have something called the “Velvetiser” by Hotel Chocolat which makes small batches but we love it.
Hot Chocolate Brownie Cookies
recipe makes 16-20 cookies
If I picture my perfect cup of hot chocolate, this is what I see: the cocoa itself, whipped cream, and marshmallows. If I were going all out, I’d add a mini candy cane and maybe some chocolate shavings. This recipe attempts to incorporate all of this, minus the whipped cream. Everyone has their own idea of the perfect hot chocolate, though, so modify it however you’d like. If you’re not a fan of marshmallows, maybe tuck in some white chocolate chunks instead when you get to that step. If you don’t love candy canes, skip that step or sprinkle on some flake salt. As I said in my 2018 blog post, “if you don’t like chocolate, why are you here?” This cookie recipe won at least one office Christmas cookie contest—I hope it brings you a little joy and a moment of decadence.
Ingredients
12oz bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup of butter, cubed
1 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt (fine sea salt or Kosher)
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 egg yolk
1/4 cup maple syrup
1.5 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 tablespoon water
“Hot Chocolate” toppings:
Mini marshmallows, about 1/2 cup to 3/4 cup
Your favorite eating chocolate, roughly chopped - roughly 1/4 cup to 1/2 cup. Our favorite here is Lindt milk chocolate
A few candy canes, crushed
1. Preheat your oven to 350ºF. Take your eggs out to get to room temperature about 30 minutes prior to baking. Put your mini marshmallows in the freezer.
2. Melt semi-sweet chocolate and cubed butter together. Use whatever method you prefer here:
Double boiler method: using a heat proof bowl set over a pot of simmering water (ensuring the bottom of the bowl does not touch the water), melt the semi-sweet chocolate and butter together. Stir frequently until the mixture is uniform and smooth. Set the bowl aside to cool.
Microwave method: in 20-30 second increments on high heat in a microwave safe bowl, melt the chocolate and butter together. Stir between each increment. Repeat until the mixture is uniform and smooth (about 3 increments for us). Set the bowl aside to cool.
3. Combine your dry ingredients in a separate medium to large sized bowl: flour, cornstarch, baking powder, salt, and cocoa powder. I typically use a sifter with flour these days. It’s fun (my toddler Nellie actually always loves to do it) and useful in many recipes for smoother mixing. Whisk all dry ingredients together until combined.
4. In the bowl of your standing mixer (or yet another bowl and a handheld mixer), whisk attachment, combine the brown sugar, 2 eggs, and 1 egg yolk on medium speed until thick and combined, maybe 3-4 minutes. It should turn a nice caramel color.
5. Add the maple syrup and vanilla. Mix on medium speed until combined (another minute or so).
6. Add the melted chocolate mixture, and mix on medium speed until combined (another 2-3 minutes).
7. Add the dry ingredients in batches. Add maybe a quarter of the dry ingredients, mix on low until just combined, and then repeat until all of the dry ingredients are incorporated. Only mix each batch in until you can’t see any more flour, and scrape down the sides if needed.
8. Add the tablespoon of water and mix on low for a few more seconds until combined. The mixture will be thick and chocolate-y.
9. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refridgerate for 15-30 minutes. While your dough is chilling, do any final prep: crush your candy canes, break your favorite chocolate into pieces, line two baking trays with parchment paper, preheat your oven to 350ºF if you haven’t yet—or sit down for a little break!
10. Pull the dough out of the fridge. This part is a bit messy, but fun! My toddlers loved it. Form into 2-3 inch balls and place on the baking trays. Leave some dough in the bowl, maybe enough leftover to form one more ball. You’ll use this extra in a few steps.
11. Press your thumb into the middle of each ball to make a well in the center, forming sort of nests.
12. Here’s where the kids really had fun. Fill each “nest” with marshmallows and chocolate chunks (or whatever you are substituting in here!) We fit about 2-3 marshmallows and several chocolate chunks into each.
13. Pull the sides up and over the marshmallows and chocolate, so that they’re hidden within. I also tried a few with the marshmallows peeking out, and they turned out great and looked more like hot chocolate too—whatever method works! We used a combination of pulling the sides back up and over the marshmallow mixture and patching the top with the leftover cookie dough.
14. Bake for 10-12 minutes until the tops are beautifully cracked. After removing from the oven, quickly and carefully top with the crushed candy cane if you’re using it. You may need to gently press the candy cane into the cookie a bit.
15. Let the cookies rest on the tray for 5-10 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.
Let that holiday magic sink in and enjoy.
