I love holiday decor! It doesn’t feel like Christmas until my living room is filled with lights and Christmas tree scent! This year I went with a classic red & green theme for our holiday decor. (You can see last year’s Elegant Wooded Christmas HERE, and the previous year’s Woodsy Christmas HERE )
You see that vase of candy on my desk? It started out about 3/4 full. I was hoping that would last the month, but it doesn’t look like we’ll make it.
As I’ve mentioned numerous times before, I love celebrations of any kind for any occasion! So you know that I looooove the holidays and must start celebrating as early as I possibly can, which means as early as Josh will let me.
Over the years I’ve convinced him to get our Christmas tree earlier and earlier. Starting last year we began getting our tree on the earliest possible day, the day after Thanksgiving. Which is perfect for me because I don’t like to mix holidays anyway! And yes, I am very aware that the tree will be dry and dead by Christmas, I don’t care! I want to start Christmas as soon as possible and you really neeeeed a tree for it to feel like Christmas!
So the day after Thanksgiving we went to take Eleanor’s Four Year Portraits and then to pick out our tree!
No, we don’t cut our own tree. While I can see the appeal to choosing your tree and cutting it yourself I’m not a fan for two reasons. First, don’t like the type of pine that is grown in the cut-your-own lots. I don’t like those thin wispy needles that make a tree look so bushy. I prefer a Noble or Douglas fir, with thick needles and strong separated branches. Second, I have terrible memories of doing it as a kid. We would stand around bored while it took forever as my dad struggled to cut it down, always frustrated and always cut at an odd angle so that it was always crooked when we put it up at home. It really wasn’t fun. Picking out the tree was the fun part. So, that’s the part that I continue for our family.
We picked out a lovely 6 foot Noble Fir. I always want to go bigger, but Josh keeps me in check. When we got home I put on the Christmas music and we got to tree trimming!
The rest of our holiday decor will be up for you tomorrow!
I think I did a pretty fabulous job decorating this year! I am so proud of myself!
This year’s theme is an Elegant Wooded Christmas. Is it weird to theme my Christmas decor? Well, how else do you decorate? I loved last year’s woodsy theme, so I wanted to use it again. But I also wanted to add a bit of sparkle and shine and use my new favorite color, royal purple, with some gold and silver. I’m so fancy!
Our trimmed tree:
I used only about a tenth of my ornaments. I have amassed quite a collection. So I pick out just the ones that work with my theme and color scheme.
This year the woodland creatures, purple, gold and silver ornaments went up.
I found this great bag of mini pinecones with a few painted gold! Perfect!
I picked up the sparkly snowflake candle holders on sale at Michaels, about a dollar a piece. I also got these poinsettias there. Although I’m not usually a fan of artificial plants, I got these ones so I’d have them for another year. I also loved the gold sparkly stamens on the mini ones. I added the purple ribbon bands to tie them in with some of my other decor.
I had planned to make a mistletoe kissing ball. I had the instructions and a list of what I would need, but I couldn’t find the mistletoe, real or artificial. So I scrapped my plans when I found this artificial one at Michaels. All I did was replace the ribbon with my purple ribbon! That saved time!
I’m not crazy about this garland. It’s okay, but doesn’t look real enough for my tastes. It was just the best I could find for a reasonable price. The good looking stuff was about $30 a string, which is just way more than I would want to spend on one piece of decor. I made these Pinecone Rosettes with instructions from Martha. I didn’t buy quite enough pinecones so mine are a little smaller and less full than hers. But I still think they turned out pretty great.
I got the idea for this grape vine wreath chandelier from another Martha craft. I wanted to do something similar with wreaths and ribbon, but I wanted something that would cover the length of our table and could use the lighting track to hang it easily.
I found these grape vine wreaths at Michaels, tied long lengths of ribbon to them, then tied the ribbon bows and sewed them with translucent thread to the ribbon used to hang them! I love how they turned out, and they doubled as cute decorations for Eleanor’s birthday party.
We live in an apartment with a small patio with one rail, so our outside decorations are pretty simple, just these lights strung on the rail, some lights around our small front window and the holly berry wreath on the front door.
Doesn’t it just feel like Christmas?! So cozy!
