Tin Merry Christmas Vintage Banner

Back in September, Nat and I celebrated our 10th Wedding Anniversary.  10 years.  Holy cow.  I find it so hard to believe how lucky I've been.  Although I failed at *some* of years in terms of delivering to her the 'traditional' anniversary gifts, I've tried to stick to the plan. 

For instance...nine years is pottery.  So, I got her both a flower pot and a glazed tile. 

Ten years?  The traditional anniversary gift is tin or aluminum. 

That one had me scratching my head.  I try to buy something vintage for these gifts and all my searches turned up housewares (platters or toasters or serving utensils) and I knew those wouldn't work. 

But then I found this Merry Christmas banner.  It is tin.  Or maybe aluminum.  Not sure.  But it *is* metal and super thin and foldable/bendable/creaseable.  It was broken at the time - cut into four segments.  But the price was right - $5 - and I figured I could use some brads and a hole puncher to reassemble it back together. 

Sure enough, I brought it home and got to work.  A little thread on each end and suddenly we had a banner.  It isn't perfect, but things that are old rarely are perfect, right?  If you look quickly, you can't tell that this thing had surgery done on it, but if you look closely - like between the[c] and [h] or the [s] and [t] in [Christmas], you'll see that the little connecting bits of tin were missing so I had to clip the letters directly together with a brad.

This photo shows it hung up on a window in our kitchen, which Natalie quickly moved and found a proper home in our green room.  It is hanging on the mantle and looks great! 

We put up one of those "Happy Birthday" banners in our kitchen for everyone's birthday and that was a childhood tradition that my mother created and Natalie has carried along.  This "Merry Christmas" banner feels like it lives in that same family, so it feels like a natural fit for us.  It isn't easy to store due to it being so fragile, but I'm thinking we can sandwich it between a book or something to keep it from being folded/creased. 

It feels like each Christmas season, we add a few items and then remove or stop 'showing' a few items.   I'll see how long this thing stays in rotation, but I'm hoping that we'll see it around for years to come.