Good Things No.91: Gold Theme Christmas Tour, Amazing Little Candle Warmer, Calendars, Books and More

Good things to do, buy, read, and watch: gold themed Christmas decor, a small candle warmer to get and gift, and cute handmade calendars, plus six short book reviews and a few good movies.

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Well, here we are in our last month of 2025! With all the events and hubbub that occur this month, I want to take a minute and tell you how much I appreciate each and every one of you for reading, making recipes, emailing me, buying my new cookbooks (!) and generally following along as we do this simple homemade life together. I do not take it for granted and I wish you a happy holiday season where you get both time with people you love and some time with a cup of tea and a good book (or blog post!).

Let’s get to our good things list for this month, starting with a farmhouse Christmas tour that I haven’t done in a few years.

Good Things List

A Gold Themed Christmas

The last few years I’ve only shared our tree in the Good Things Lists, so I thought I’d share a bit more this year to show how I’ve updated the decor we’ve used for years by picking a new theme. I’ve done buffalo check, green-and-white, and cozy white knitted themes in the past and this year I was inspired by a Balsam Hill catalog (the “gilded age” section) to go with a gold and ivory theme.

For the tree I bought this wide velvet ribbon to make the ribbon loops and some inexpensive gold balls similar to these (all our ball ornaments were silver or shiny brite colored ornaments). Then I pulled out all the gold and white ornaments we had along with the thin ivory bows I’ve used the last couple of years.

Without a mantel, our entryway bookshelf becomes a makeshift one with a garland and our stockings. I still use many things I’ve made through the years like the pom-pom wreath and garland, and joy sign. The focal point is my grandma’s nativity set which has seen every Christmas in our family’s history (and the rubber version on the bottom shelf is one my kids played with and I can put out again for our grandson!).

I still use the TV cabinet top for my hand painted village houses which I surround with all kinds of trees and tree shapes. I still need a garland for the lights (I can’t remember what I used last year) and at night there are votives on timers that light the houses up, which I love.

The dining room got the gold and white treatment with brass candlesticks I’ve collected over the years (with these battery tapers I can put on a timer) and the gold bottlebrush Dollar Tree trees I got last year along with a couple ivory trees I had and the gold glittered pinecones I made years ago. I kept it on a platter so we can easily move it now, but for Christmas day I will place the trees all along the center with the candles.

In the kitchen I added a double faux garland to the stair rail with lights, gold balls, a gold bead garland, and bows made from the velvet ribbon I used on the tree (maybe this is where the other garland went, ha!). I have a wreath with gold ribbon on our wood range hood and a tray of small houses on our island and that’s about it.

So that’s this year’s tour. I only spent about $35 to update our Christmas decorations to focus on gold and white, which I hope shows you don’t have to spend much to change up and reinvigorate your decor. If you want to – of course there’s joy in using the same loved ornaments and decor every year, too!

(And there’s another peek at the new side porch we’re in the process of building – the ceiling you see through the window will be white beadboard one day. And yes, the window was installed too high, but that’s a whole different story…)

Small Candle Warmer

If you get my newsletter, you’ve heard me go on about this cute little candle warmer! While I’ve seen them around for a couple of years, they seemed big and were surprisingly expensive ($50 seemed a lot to me, at least). But about a month ago I found this smaller black candle warmer for only $20 and bought it for our bathroom morning candle (I love having a lightly scented candle while I’m getting ready).

What makes this amazing? Besides the candle wax melting from the heat of the halogen light bulb – no flames needed – and that you can put it on a timer so it will go off automatically, is the fact that the candle wax lasts seemingly forever!! I just can’t get over that the candle you see above (with half of it’s wax melted) is the same one we started with one month ago. You can just see where the liquid wax line is at the top – yes, at the top, still! When the wax hardens up again, it’s like a new candle, you can’t even tell it’s been melted.

At this rate I wonder how many candles I’ll need a year – 1 or 2? I also realized you better get a candle you want to look at for that long (unlike this weird green colored one that was on steep discount, lol) and that you want to smell for that long.

From the reviews, I will have to buy more of the little bulbs, but I found this pack of 6 GU10+C 120v bulbs (same as the 2 bulbs included in the lamp) for less than $10, so I’ll still be saving money on buying candles through the year.

As for the types of candles I use, I recommend a soy-wax base with a light scent hopefully from essential oils or natural fragrances. These hand poured soy wax candles in different scents on Etsy (from a 16 year old entrepreneur with great shop reviews!) look good as well as these small handcrafted 4-oz candle tins which would work since they last so long!

Pretty Handcrafted 2026 Calendars

My friend, Mary from Front Porch Ideas, has an Etsy shop and created a new calendar for 2026 to go along with her beautiful wildflower calendar from last year (which has been updated for 2026, too). It’s called “Through My Kitchen Window” and is such a clever idea with the scene changing both outside and inside as the seasons go by.

I bought the wildflower one for a floral-loving relative and am getting the kitchen window calendar for me! I can’t wait to see all the little details through the window for each month.

See the wildflower calendar here and the kitchen window calendar here.

November Books Read

Head’s Up: Audible is running a holiday special – .99 a month for 3 months which allows you to choose one best seller or new release a month (which is yours to keep) as well as listen all you want to their library of podcasts, audiobooks, and Audible Originals during the 3 months. The three books are yours to keep and listen to in the Audible app, even if you cancel after the 3-month period. While there are other audiobook listening apps, Audible is the easiest to use, the easiest to gift, and they’re always running sales and 2-for-1 credit offers. I’ve gotten a lot out of my Audible membership over the years and use it in conjunction with my library app.

Heroes, Stephen Fry. Brian and I listened to this over quite a long time (it’s a long book) and it was just as entertaining as the other books we’ve read in this series (Mythos, etc.). Stephen Fry just does a fantastic job, not only with the clever narration, but with the amount of research he’s put into gathering all the details on these ancient, mythic hero tales and putting them together into a storyline we can (sort of) follow. So many of our stories, movies, and books have pulled from these hero stories, so it was interesting to see the supposed origins of some of them and how so many were related to the others. We loved this.

Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Becky Chambers. I had been hearing about this book for years and as someone who enjoys a good sci-fi book I decided to go for it. From what I’ve read in reviews since finishing it, you either love this book or you don’t, lol. It’s billed as sort of gentle sci-fi, more character-based and it is that. It is also almost plot-less and nothing much happens. There’s a lot of talking. You learn about people’s background. It just wasn’t for me – I don’t think I’m a bang-up kind of gal, but I do like a little action in the sci-fi genre.

Just Don’t Fall, Emma St. Clair. After enjoying the last Emma St. Claire book (If All Else Sails – I even gifted it to my mom), I tried another of her stories, choosing this first book in a loose series featuring a hockey team. This still had the banter, real-life sounding dialog (most of the time), and slow (clean) burn of the other book, but it didn’t catch me like the other. I may or may not read more of her books – we’ll see.

An American Beauty, Shana Abe. This is a fictionalized account of one of the richest women of the gilded age, Arabella Huntington, who started out as a teenaged gambling house worker (maybe prostitute?) and ended up married to a railroad magnate who discovered her there and started a years-long affair before marrying her after his wife died. I found this super interesting in both the historical aspect and how the author fleshed out why she would do some of the things she did (starvation is a big motivator). Her later life was rushed through at the end, so I looked some things up and found that she (and her two Huntington husbands) gave a lot to charities and museums, parks, and hospitals that still bear the Huntington name.

Tilt, Emma Pattee. This book had such a great premise that I waited months for it from the library – a pregnant woman is in the Portland, Oregon Ikea when “the big one” earthquake hits and she tries to make it to her husband. Sadly, it was more about her thoughts and her previous life than what it was like in Portland after the quake. She did mention a lot of names, streets, and areas which was fun to hear (after having lived there for 12 years, they were all places I knew about), but her decisions began to drive me batty (jepordizing herself and her baby by continuing to try and get to her husband who probably wasn’t there). And the end – ugh, it’s pretty much the non-ending I dislike in books.

The Lost Bookshop, Evie Woods. This is another book I’ve seen around for a couple years as a heartwarming story that combines historical fiction, women’s fiction, and magical fantasy. The story flips back and forth in time (present and 1920s through WWII) following the lives of two women who are both struggling with major issues, one domestic violence and the other an attempted forced marriage that ends in incarceration in an insane asylum (the past storyline when men could do this to women). So not quite the “lighthearted” story I was expecting, though they were good storylines and both resolved positively eventually. The magical element of a bookshop that’s there sometimes and then not, as well as a tree growing in the walls of an apartment with no one thinking anything much of it, and a woman that may have been there or may not, is just not my thing, though. Which I knew going in, but reviews swayed me (seriously, almost 5 stars with 150k reviews on Amazon!). It’s not bad, just not a genre for me, I learned.

Watching

Good Fortune, Theater. This was surprisingly good, both funny and heartfelt. We were talking about the themes of this (the huge divide between the haves and have-nots) for a long time after. Big Note: The trailer doesn’t do the film justice – it’s a little odd.

Murderbot, AppleTV. Brian and I LOVED the book series by Martha Wells, and while I enjoyed this series, it’s not nearly as good as the books. They upped the cutsey-cringing factor by focusing on the people more than the Sec Unit, which was really the best part.

Wicked For Good, Theater. We saw this Thanksgiving weekend with our whole family which was fun. But of course this second half of the movie from last year wasn’t as interesting or as fun. Super long with scenes that went on way too long (and SO many close-ups of Ariana Grande…).

That’s it for another addition of the Good Things List!

If you’d like to see more of what I’m enjoying, you can check out all the Good Things Lists here. I’d love to know what you think – if you’ve tried any of these or what you’d recommend. Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

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