With the new year just around the corner and our last week of holiday break coming to a close, we're beginning to clean up the house and wanted to take a quick pause to share some of our favorite photos from how we "decked" the halls this year.
The holidays are always a time we look forward to bringing out the festive decorations. Some are old family favorites, while others are brand new. Some pieces have dedicated places year after year while others get worked into new areas — it's always a creative challenge to rethink our space and reimagine the same decorations in new ways.
While we didn't have a white Christmas, we did get a beautiful dusting in early December. The first snow always feels a bit magical and even Basil took a few moments to watch the snowfall (or maybe a squirrel).
We found this little gem on Etsy from a shop called Handmade in Madison. There are some other cute variations out there too if you like the idea.
We put up our tree in the front office this year. It was one of the tallest we've ever brought home and made lots of room for our growing collection of ornaments. This year seemed to be all about the nutcracker — I'd gone to see the Richmond Ballet with my nieces and we had fun picking out a few mementos from the day.
This was the first year I went all out on a gift wrap theme for a full lot of presents under our tree, but can you blame me with this cheerful paper? We found it at Hobby Lobby and fell hard for the metallic dots — there was little hope for me after that.
We've grown to love the space over our family room mantle to house holiday cards from friends and family, along with our Christmas stockings. The reclaimed card display was a DIY project we made a few seasons back and has easily become one of our favorite holiday pieces:
The taller, narrow card with the Christmas tree on the front pictured above is one of the most meaningful to us this year. It's the tear-away tag from the Christmas Angel we adopted this year and was a nice reminder of the true meaning of the season for us. This year Tim and I decided to adopt an 11-year-old girl from the Richmond Angel Tree program in place of gifts to one another. It's a new tradition we hope to carry on for years to come.
For those wondering, it was a brass goose from our vintage collection that stood in to hold up my stocking this year and a mighty fine job he did among Santa and his reindeer.
Atop our mantle in the front office, Mr. & Mrs. Claus kept a close watch over the comings & goings at our front door. We have an entire collection of Santa figurines that came from Tim's family. In the past few years we've brought out four to represent each member of our family; this year we brought out the entire bunch — more on that below.
I can't remember if I've shared the NOEL planters here on the blog before, but this year they brightened up the bar between our kitchen and dining room. These also came from Tim's family and the story behind them is one that lands Tim on the naughty list —
They belonged to his mother and each year when visiting her home for Christmas, Tim and his brother would rearrange the letters to spell out "LEON." It would take days before his mother would realize the change, all the while she'd been entertaining other guests in her home. As Tim's kids grew old enough, he eventually taught them to do the same. Needless to say, it's a funny family tradition we have with this specific decoration so we're happy to carry it over into our home now.
If you follow us on Instagram, then you already know we've been making some changes in our dining room, one of which is our new glass cabinets along the back wall...
I mentioned earlier that we'd brought out the full bunch of Santa figurines to display this year and the new cabinet ledge is where they found a happy home amidst clippings of greenery from our tree. They're such a happy bunch!
Finally, I wanted to share the holiday greeting we sent out to friends and family this year with each of you. It's a grouping of snaps we took on our front porch last Christmas. The design came from Minted and I think it captures the spirit of our family so well:
So that's a wrap on this year's holidays from us and ours! It's hard to believe another season has come and gone and we are so thankful that you took a moment from your day to share in our little home tour this time round.
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