Holiday Home Tour

It's hard to believe that Christmas has already come and gone.  I love the way our house looks around the holidays.  It always seems so warm and inviting, so I'm a bit sad to take down our Christmas decorations.  Before I do that, however, I wanted to share how we decorated our home for the holidays.

As I've said before, over the years, my holiday decorating style has changed from "Christmas exploded in our house" to touches of Christmas.  I like to take our everyday decorations and add a little Christmas to them whether it's changing out white candles for red or adding simple ornaments to a vase.  

To start, I normally lay out everything we have and pick and choose what I want.  I sometimes get a little overwhelmed at the thought of using it all (after all, why do I have it if I'm not going to use it?), so this year, I started off by making two piles.  One pile was for those things I love and just had to display and the other one for those things that I just wasn't feeling. I knew that I wasn't going to use everything in both piles and that was ok.  I would either donate it or save it for next year since my style is always evolving.

Once I had my piles, I started with the mantle, per usual.  I've been loving the old shutter and thrifted mirror combo from the fall, so I wanted to leave that up.  I then pulled a few favorites from the "love" pile and tried out a bunch of different combinations until I found something I was happy with.  

I kept the hearth simple since we've been using the fireplace a lot more 
with the colder weather and I didn't want to have to rearrange stuff every time.  I just put some duraflame logs in a Salvation Army bucket so we'd have easy access.  We then moved one of our Ikea wicker chairs into the corner, tossed a throw over it, and pulled in one of the red pillows my mother-in-law made.  I loved how that chair filled the space better than the old Captain's chair that was there before did.  Of course, now I'm faced with the dilema of what to do once we take the tree down.  Do I leave the chair there or move it back to it's original location? Decisions, decisions.

Anyway, now that that area was done, I moved on to the rest of the living room.  I love the red wreath we got at the Christmas Tree Shop a few years ago and normally displayed it on the back door, you know, where no one ever saw it.  Our front door is red so it didn't work there and last year, we had it on the mantle for awhile.  Running out of options, I decided to hang it on the French door between the mudroom and living room.  It totally transformed the space.  Such a simple change, but I kind of want to keep it there all year round now. 

The small table behind the French door was pretty simple as well.  I took the snowman we used on last year's mantle, added some Christmas Tree candles, and that was that.

My next focus was on the mudroom.  There isn't a lot of stuff in that room, so it's simple to decorate.  The hubby actually suggested what to put on the little table and I liked it so we went with it.  And yes, if you're wondering, Dan does help me decorate for Christmas.  It's a lot of work, so he's what I like to call the runner.  He runs up and down the stairs to the basement retrieving the bins and those random items I need when an idea pops into my head.  He's the best!

My favorite Christmas song is "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" and last year for Christmas, the hubby got me an Etsy sign with those words.  I was so excited to find a special place for it this season.  It didn't look right on the mantle and I didn't really want to hang it on the wall, so I was stumped.  Then when I was decorating the mudroom, I thought about the top of the chimney.  We're pretty sure the mudroom and laundry area were an addition, so the chimney literally runs up through the middle of the house.  I love the exposed brick, but have never really thought to decorate the area.  The sign fit perfectly, and I added a plush Santa (something unbreakable in case it fell).

I needed something different to display our Christmas cards this year.  The one we had from last year filled up too quickly and you couldn't see all the cards.  So this year, I took the burlap we used on last year's tree (I didn't buy enough so it didn't turn out how I envisioned it) and hung it on the French door in between the mudroom and laundry room.  I used some Christmas brads I had on hand for scrapbooking to hang up the cards. It was really cute, but I'll confess something, I didn't finish it.  Now it's sort of pointless since the decorations will all be coming down shortly.  I did put up the four cards we had by the time our party rolled around, but the pile just kept growing.  Oops.

I skipped the laundry room since I like to keep the counter in there clear so we can use it, so the last area to decorate was the kitchen.  I typically focus on just a few rooms at Christmas and leave our office and guest bedroom neutral.  The downstairs bath is the next room on the to do list, so I've kind of been ignoring it since we moved it.  I like to keep the kitchen counters clear of decorations as well so we have room to cook/bake, so I primarily turn my attention to the dish rack we have in between the kitchen windows and back door.  I usually put out our festive martini glasses so I just took some leftover pieces from the love pile and filled in the missing spaces.

We did our tree last.  I've always had a fake tree and loved that part of the tradition was hauling out the same tree year after year.  Sadly, the yardsale tree we had in our apartment was too big for our house.  Our living room isn't all that big and the only place to really put it was in the bay window.  We picked this one up on sale at Target last year, and while it's on the tall/skinny side, it does fit the space pretty well.  I didn't want something that would touch the radiators on either side of the tree, so this worked out.  It's not as full or as large as I'd like, but it works.  We put the other Ikea chair next to it and it fit really well.

 

So that's how our house looked for Christmas.  Hopefully making the change from Christmas to winter won't be too much work. 
 
Be well,