Keeping It Simple For Christmas

For the past few years, I have been in downsize mode with my entire life. Moving from my 4200 sf home to a new 2600 sf was the beginning, and now Christmas decorating for me has been very simple and lean.

It is just myself and my two kids, and since they are now teenagers (13 and 17), they are not very big on the whole decorating hoopla as when they were younger. Quite frankly, I am not either. I grew up in Jamaica in very humble surroundings where celebrating Christmas for us was more about the birth of Jesus Christ, church and family. We didn’t necessarily have a Christmas tree in our home or exchanged presents.

Over the years, I went all out for my kids, but recently I have the strong desire to get back to my roots and to really focus on the true meaning of Christmas.

The Decorator in me will always want to do some decorating though, and I still love to admire the really over the top Christmas decorations I have seen from fellow design bloggers 🙂

This year my Christmas color theme is gold, white, silver and a tiny touch of blush. I decided just to decorate my fireplace mantel, a 5 -1/2 foot tree in the living room (yes that is a small tree 🙂 ), and a small table top tree in the foyer

This is the mantel. I love bringing in a real garland for the mantel every year. I usually just add a string of white lights and some ornaments. This year I decided to layer a second beaded garland with ornaments just for a bit more glitz 🙂

You may notice my Nativity Scene to the left on the hearth. My late husband bought it for me many years ago. I always have it displayed either on a table top or by the tree.

The tree after some of the presents were added. Some of my lights at the bottom of the tree stopped working the minute I finished decorating it 🙁

A closeup of the presents that we added so far.

Another view of my Nativity Scene. My son broke Joseph years ago, and so one of the Shepherds has been standing in for him since then 🙂

This is my table top tree in the foyer with a simple wreath nearby

Dining Room Vignette

Of course I added a tiny bit of sparkle to small vignettes around the room. Here just a gold starlight hints at Christmas sparkle

And a bit of reindeer games in the foyer 🙂

My Santa looks a little bit mean (at least my son thinks so), but he was a new purchase this year from Target

I found these navy nutcrackers at Home Goods and I couldn’t resist bringing them home! 🙂

And of course, you guys saw my bar area in the last post that is all set for holiday entertaining.

The funnest part of all this was going to the tree farm to cut down our very own tree.

My daughter works at Dewberry Farms in Brookshire, which is a seasonal fairground out in the country, and they happen to also have a huge Christmas tree farm with thousands of Christmas trees – seven different varieties.

After dropping her off at work one Sunday, Josh and I took the hayride out to cut down our tree. We decided to go with a small pine one that would be easy for us to carry into the house and set up.

We totally weren’t dressed appropriately, as we were both wearing flip flops in all that dirt.