Holiday Home Tour

I thought I’d throw together a quick tour of some of the holiday decorations around our home before Christmas day gets here. I love to keep my decorations simple, traditional, but with lots of sparkle.

I love gold and silver holiday decor and anything that sparkles, so my larger tree downstairs is adorned with shiney silver tinsel, silver ribbon, glass ornaments, silver and gold stars and woodland type novelties.

It’s a real Fraser fir. I LOVE the smell of real trees and garland at Christmas. That smell makes me warm and cozy and tells me Christmas time is finally here, so I don’t think any fake tree no matter how beautifully life-like it looks will break us of the habit of buying a real one each year! It’s a tradition that we cannot be swayed from. We don’t have a ton of space for a tree downstairs and only have 8 foot ceilings, so we always have to look for a medium sized tree. We found this one at Costco this year – a nice surprise!

On this tree hangs many glass ornaments that have been given to me or handed down to me by my family, mostly my mom. This beautiful glass angel actually belonged to my grandmother. It was one of my favorite ornaments that hung on her tree growing up and I am so blessed to hang it on mine every year. I also have a very delicate set of glass bells that hang on this tree from her.

We picked up a few of these large paper stars at Target this year to add to the decoration on this tree and I just love them. I love how they fill out the tree because of their size and they were super easy to unfold and shape!

Soft white lights fill the tree limb to limb; I wrapped traditional silver tinsel tight to the interior of the tree so it would shimmer in the light and then floated twirled silver ribbons around the edge.

This ornament is a hand-painted ball from St. Jude’s hospital in Memphis, TN. It depicts Santa and his reindeer flying through a starry night sky. Isn’t it pretty?

This tree is also adorned with a few woodland inspired elements like shiny acorns, sparkly owls, bristle bears and this little bird that I just love. Isn’t she cute?

Our new mantle is pretty simple this year. We took lighted garland layered over the top, hung a boxwood wreath over our new mirror (using a bent coat-hanger) and then layered in vases filled with twigs and wheat, a sleigh, some Holiday art and hung our stockings. We found these handy mantle clips at Target that work great! Every year, our stockings are too heavy for our usual deer stocking hangers, but these actually clip to your mantle and the way they are shaped means the extra weight is distributed perfectly to balance them. I highly recommend getting these – they work great!

Our dining room table is decked out in shimmering silver details to match the nearby tree in our office. It is set with glittery silver chargers adorned with acorns and topped with a beautiful silver reindeer from Michaels, owls, candles, tons of mercury votives and jars and two silver trees. Both the bottle brush tree and the wrapped tree came from Target last year. Then I just laid some Fraser fir branches cut from our tree while we were trimming it around the decor and strewn some more pinecones around. It’s sparkly and woodsy and simple.

My family started a tradition of purchasing a Department 56 house, often a retired piece that is hard to find, from a particular village set for each “family” every year. Ours is the Alpine Village, which is a German-style winter escape filled with Beerhouses, European shops, a German church, historic homes, even a cuckoo clock shop. They all have German names or signs on them and typical Tudor style architecture. Our new house this year was actually a quaint Guesthouse Inn. We set them up on our console in our office this year due to space – it’s about the only thing that will hold them all. We lay down a piece of white felt that resembles snow, set books of differing heights underneath to add “mountains” and visual appeal!

Finally, upstairs in our bonus room is another tree. This one is rustic and red and very personal. We purchased this tree on clearance last year at Target. It’s a pre-lit 6′ Alberta Spruce. I wrap it with red wooden bead garland and tiny red and silver tinsel. We hang lots of red and white and red and gold globe ornaments on this tree along with many vintage and personal ones. Then we finish it off with classic red tree candles.

Vintage Mickey Mouse can be found in many forms on this tree…

…as well as Remington’s precious Winnie the Pooh 1st Year ornament. This guys is 32 years old now and in very delicate shape.

We’ve also got fun, nerdy ornaments like a set of Doctor Who ornaments our friends made for us one year out of Perler beads. Do you remember those fun craft beads that you melt together with an iron at daycare or summer camp as a kid???

And then there are personalized ornaments that have been given to us as gifts over the years. We love getting things like this for Christmas! 2012 was the year we bought and moved into our house! 🙂

Gotta have some local love on this tree too!

This tree got a shiny new Capiz Angel topper this year too! We found her at Target when they were having one of their big holiday sales. I think she’s the perfect thing to crown this cute little tree!

We kept things pretty simple and minimal (for us) this year with how busy we’ve been, but it’s still always nice to have the decorations up this time of year. It makes our home feel so cozy and festive. I love sitting by the tree in the evening and just looking at it. It may be 70 degrees on Christmas day, but we can still try to make it feel like the holidays!

Here’s wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas this season!

K&R