Links & Tips before we get started:
Fairy curtain lights Only$16 bucks!
3D Christmas Snowflakes Only $12 bucks!
Tips: Budget $20 to $50 a year to add to additional décor for the holidays
Thrift stores, Habitat for Humanity, & Dollar Tree are your friends 🙂
If you can make/craft that shit for cheaper DO IT!!!
Like most people I love Christmas! It has it’s stressful moments of straight consumerism for sure. That used to turn me off to the whole season!!! I gravitated more to loving Thanksgiving, for the idea of simple food and family gathering. However, becoming a mom, and having little ones light up over the Christmas magic in the air is freakin priceless! So in turn, I have learned to really love it. We have our Christmas traditions like most families do, and I love all those festivities. One of the things I love most is really capturing that Christmas warmth in the home! I remember waking up early for school as a kid and the tree would be all lit up. It made every morning feel a little magical. I try to harness that feeling and deck the house out for the kiddos in lots of color, lights, and cheer! I may end up having one of those classy, all white/neutral Christmases, with fine China one day! Haha, but for now our Christmas décor is packed with color, fun, lots of lights, and tons of kid friendly items. Christmas is about so much more than home décor, but creating a festive, cozy setting to enjoy what Christmas is about is something I truly enjoy! Let’s start in the living room….
With any and every Holiday I start with the Mantel. It’s my focal point. I swear you could deck out the mantel for any holiday and not decorate anywhere else and it still feels festive in the whole room! So to start, I took down my mirror that is usually placed above our fireplace and added a Christmas themed picture over the mantel instead. I found this cute picture at Ross last year for super cheap! It has little clips to add family pictures on it. I added family Christmas pictures from years past. Adding a Christmas picture above the fireplace is not a must, but it definitely adds to the overall change up for Christmas. Next is garland and stockings.!!!! I found our garland and stockings at Hobby Lobby almost 5 years ago. They still have similar ones, and even prettier ones now. I like to go during their sales, as they can be a little pricier for me. You could honestly stop here… If you have a Christmas picture up, some garland, and stockings hung…. You are golden! I tend to go a little over board and that look isn’t for everyone, but do what makes YOU happy!!!! I add a bunch of collected Christmas items across the mantel. It’s covered in Christmas crafted items made for us by my husbands mom, and second mom, and items collected over the years. It can be a bit much, but I loooove it!
We put our tree right next to our mantel. So when watching TV or sitting on the couch we are facing the tree and mantel, and it just feels like Christmas! We found our tree a few years back at Habitat for Humanity for only $20 bucks. Fake trees can be pricey, so definitely check those thrift stores or Facebook marketplace for a secondhand one! We have some pretty ornaments from Hobby Lobby, lots of collected ornaments, tons of kid made ornaments, and even Dollar Tree ornaments as fillers. If you have a color theme go with that, you can add some burlap, or ribbon or tinsel….whatever is going to make YOU and your family smile. I know my kids feel special when they see something they made on it. So our tree is decked out in kid crafted ornaments! Here is our little tree and some of our special ornaments made by our family.
One item I am absolutely loving this year are my Fairy curtain lights!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am literally obsessed with these as they just set off the whole room for the holidays!!! I have seen them online for years but was never that interested… I ended up ordering some last year for a fall backdrop wall in our dining room. I loved them so much I left them up for Christmas and New Years, and honestly was so sad to take them down after the holidays. I found them on Amazon for only $16.99! The link is above! I added them to the wall behind our couch and tree. They are sooo pretty! They just add that Christmas magic twinkling on the wall. I love watching a movie in the evening with the tree and curtain lights lit up!
Next up are the living room shelves. I normally just add a few little Christmas touches to the shelves. This year I literally took everything off of them and only added Christmas themed décor. I mean it’s only a month out of the year so why not???? I loved being able to display crafted items from family here! My favorite are the little Gnomes made by one of my Mother in laws, and my son’s little footprints as mistletoe, made by my daughter!
Lastly, our little coffee table also got a Christmas makeover. You can style a coffee table any way your little heart desires, but you will rarely catch mine with out a floral arrangement or a candle LOL! Hey, I know what I like! So I decorated a tray with some Christmas florals, and a vase from good ole Dollar Tree. I painted the vase with white chalk paint and added a Christmas bow from Dollar Tree as well. I was able squeeze in a great smelling candle, and Santa. Then I filled the open space in the tray with sparkly ornaments and pinecones.
I threw a couple red pillows on the couch and voila we are done with the living room!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What what!!!!!!!!!! Isn’t she fun???!!!
Next up is the Kitchen! I don’t mind a cluttered mantel because its to look at, not a work space. I DO NOT LIKE clutter in the Kitchen! I cook a lot and it stresses me out. I like a clean clutter free work space, so not too much goes on in here. A few little touches like a Christmas recipe book in the corner, and little trinkets or garland in the window are enough for me. I also have a little cake stand I like to leave out for the month to add Christmas treats to. Other than that, I like clean counters! 🙂
However, we did add some things that are out of the way to make it just a little more festive and fun! I personally wish my cabinets went all the way to the ceiling! I’m SURE that will be a DIY in my future! But since they currently have that gap at the top, we like to decorate up there for Christmas. This year we decorated it with big light up letters that say HOME. We switched out the O as a Christmas Wreath. A little tinsel garland up top too, to tie it all together. The last little festive touches on the cabinets, and bar stools are quite cheesy, and gaudy and again not for everyone, but they are fun and my kids love it. We wrapped our cabinets as presents (my daughter actually did this :), and we add little Santa hat covers to our bar stools. All of those items we grab at Dollar Tree. The ribbon, bows, and seat covers! Since our Kitchen is open concept into our living room adding in some of these fun, kid friendly decorations just ties the spaces together. Here is a full look.
I also add little touches of Christmas to our Coffee Bar and Adult Bar. As for the Coffee Bar, a cute sign, Christmas mugs, and a coffee holding Santa do the the trick. It’s just enough to make this area feel like Christmas as I make my Coffee in the mornings, or the kids’ Hot Chocolate and Tea in the evenings.
As for the Adult Bar we keep it a little more simple and elegant. Our bar is filled with Crystal Decanters we have been gifted from my Mother in Law over the years. A Christmas wine glass and Santa wrapped wine bottle, accompanied by a Crystal Christmas Tree, and Crystal Candy dish, do the trick in this space!
Next is our Dining Room. This is one of my favorite spaces! It’s the first room when you walk in the front door and its the room you see as you walk down the steps from the second story. It’s where we enjoy our Christmas meals and where I have my morning coffee. We do have a fake tree in our living room that we incorporated a few years back, but we have always been a family that picks a real tree. I love the smell of a real tree, and the tradition of picking it out, ever since I was a child. We put our real tree in this room. We normally put it in front of the window so you can see it from the front of the house. We opted for a smaller tree this year because man, they have gotten really expensive!!!! We decorate this tree in lots of buffalo check, black, white and red.
For this room I started with those fairy light curtains I am loving against the backwall to give the room that Christmas sparkle. As for the table I do different things each year and am working on finding a setting I absolutely love. This year I opted for a little Christmas snow forest running down the middle of the table, accompanied by candles, and cascading paper snowflakes falling from the chandelier! Hahah like my fancy descriptive writing? I already had chargers and table runners from previous years décor as well as some Santa Hat chair covers. So I just added a few things to that. Every year we budget around $50 or so for new Christmas décor. This is what’s doable for us, but set whatever budget is doable for you, and stick to it! Although I would love to go out and splurge on some beautiful high end items I have seen, I personally enjoy the task of finding things budget friendly! Once I find something, I love staging it to look beautiful and elegant. This year I spent the budget in this room. I bought the Fairy curtain lights for $16.99 and the 3D Christmas Snowflakes for $12.99 on Amazon. I found the little flocked Christmas trees, candle stick holders, and candles at Dollar Tree. I also found some pretty white plates with metallic silver snowflakes on them this year. They totally fit my theme, so I grabbed those too! I had bought the red buffalo check chargers plates at Dollar Tree last year, so I used those again. I also had pinecones we collected the year before from a neighbors tree. I added those into the Tablescape as well. Turned out so cute! I love that I can use these items in other places next year too. Here is the dining room!
I love how it turned out this year! It’s super festive. This is the first room you walk into from the front door and first room you see coming down the stairs. It just feels super festive every morning when I wake up to come down stairs, or each time I get home and walk in the door. I really love the table setting up close. I still can’t believe most everything on the table is from the Dollar Tree!
This year was so fun to decorate. It was bittersweet knowing my daughter will be off to college next year and this might be the last time she helps me decorate. She was excited to help, and I liked seeing her little creative mind work. She liked the creative process and ended up wanting to decorate her own room too. She chose her own color palette (muted green and white) and it turned out super cute! Let me know in the comments if you want to see it! I loved watching the boys decorate the trees with their tiny hands, drinking their little hot cocoa’s. I think I fell even more in love with my husband as I watched him string snowflakes from the chandelier LOL. Knowing he hates decorating and he did it for me 😍 !
I hope I gave you some sort of inspiration to create a budget friendly, festive, fun Christmas! If you have any questions, comments, or Ideas for the blog. Comment below! Thank you so much for stopping by the blog today! Christmas love sent from my family to yours!
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