Calming and Simple Christmas Decor (2019)

Join me for a mini home tour of our simple Christmas decor in our temporary home that proves you can still enjoy anywhere you live when you give your spaces touches of things you love. This year the holiday decorating theme was calming and simple with muted greens, white, black, silver, and gold.

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Well, in looking back at previous year’s holiday decorating I see that I’m later than ever in sharing our simple and calming Christmas decor this year. A couple of things conspired against me, the first being that Thanksgiving was later than normal (though I suppose that does happen on a regular basis, like every 5 or 6 years?).

Anyway, if you are a newsletter subscriber (No? Sign up above or below and join thousands who look forward to it weekly in their inboxes!), you know that I like to fully embrace Thanksgiving and wait to decorate for Christmas until afterwards. Yes, even though I’m a blogger and many start showing you their decor at the beginning of November.

I get that – it can inspire us to start thinking about our decor and give us ideas. I’m just a real-live blogger, though, and can’t make myself do that unless I had to for some reason. There’s room for all in this internet world, isn’t there?

So, better late than never, here is our Christmas decor for this year – yet another one in our temporary home while we work on our farmhouse fixer (Will this be the last year? I hope so!).

2019 Calming and Simple Christmas Decor

So right away you’ll notice it’s not that different from last year’s decor. That’s the way I planned it for a couple of reasons:

1. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on new things after buying quite a few things the last few years.
2. I still really liked the buffalo plaid and green color scheme.
3. As I was pulling out the decorations and setting them up, I was drawn to simple vignettes and tabletops.
4. Our daughter is spending a year abroad and she’s been my decorating helper for years – I knew I wouldn’t be in the mood to do a lot. Plus every year seems to be less and less as far as decorating.

The gold and white star pillows on the chairs are the only things I purchased this year. They are from my favorite pillow source, H&M Home, which you can see here.

Between the last two photos above you can see what our whole living room-entry looks like in the manufactured home we’re living in while working on the farmhouse. The walls are definitely not colors I would choose, but they’re still neutral enough that I just left them.

Here’s a close up of the shelf in the living room that serves as a “mantle” for decorating. This is where I first started putting the Christmas decor out and immediately liked the simple look of the cone trees and muted eucalyptus wreath I bought last year.

I was even tempted to leave it with just the wreath and cones, but then found the Noel paper mache letters I made a few year ago (the easy tutorial for that is here) and saw that the greens looked great together.

As I was putting this shelf together, I shared it on my Instagram stories (you can click on the Christmas Highlights on my Instagram page here to see) and asked if people liked it without lights or with:

The vote was overwhelmingly WITH lights!

But I do enjoy it in the morning without lights and turn them on as the day continues. Which is about 4 o’clock now with how dark it’s getting, ha!

You know how you have things for years and then realize they’d look good together, like a collection? That’s what happened to these putz houses and cloches. I just set them together on a table – which I’d never done before – and liked out it turned out.

Our tree this year is a Grand Fir. We had quite a time finding a live tree for a decent price. Apparently there’s a shortage and so the prices are through the roof for our part of the country from what we’re used to. I know there are many states that have always paid a lot for trees, but we literally live down the road from Christmas tree farms, so it’s always been easy to get trees for $20-$30.

In fact, Brian and I talked about this in our recent podcast and if we’d ever think about investing in a realistic looking artificial tree with prestrung lights. I never thought I would, but this year was making me rethink that. You can listen or read a transcript of that podcast episode here.

Actually you can see last year’s Christmas tree on that show notes page and compare – it was a shorter Noble Fir, but the shape was much better and the stiffer branches of the Noble holds the ornaments much nicer. Oh, well – the smell of the Grand Fir is divine!

The dining room contains quite a few things you might recognize from previous years – the faux cedar chair wreaths I bought last year from Hearth & Hand (here is the version for this year), the brass candlesticks, and the wool pom pom wreath and garlands (which are still one of my favorite DIY’s ever – you can get the tutorial here).

I also reused the no-sew green plaid runner from a few years ago (that coordinate with the Noel letters).

I used a lamb’s ear garland for the centerpiece with some of my grandma’s vintage Shiny Brite ornaments around the candles and galvanized-glass vase trio set from last year (which isn’t available – this is something close).

I thought about finding some realistic faux white roses for the vases, but the only ones I found didn’t look realistic – I probably need to just buy real ones one year to get that look. A creamy poinsettia flower does the job with a few fir sprigs thrown in.

And the jadeite dishes are new, not vintage – I found the small square plates and the serving platter both through Hearth & Hand last spring. They don’t have anything on the site right now to link to – hopefully they’ll offer more in the spring. I do like how it looks with white dishes and ironstone.

So there you have it – our simple and calming Christmas decor this year. I hope you enjoyed “visiting” and that you have a blessed holiday with family and friends!

 

 

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