OK, so I really wanted to do a Christmas home tour this year. Firstly, because we just got new living room furniture and I kind of wanted to show it off. Secondly, because I really enjoy seeing the home tours that other bloggers put together this time of year even though they kind of make me feel bad about myself. Thirdly, I don’t want to make people feel bad about themselves so I’m sharing how un-fancy I really am with my decor this year. Fourthly…. well there is no fourthly, but Chris always gets mad at me when I make lists of only 2-3 items. So I tried. Anyway, with out further ado, here it is!
So, I have to be honest with you, even though I only spent a total of maybe 5 minutes decorating this year, I actually really really love how our house looks right now more than ever before. Everything is really simple and tidy and just calming. I like calming these days with a 1-year-old and a bathroom completely torn apart to deal with. So I know that it doesn’t provide quite as much inspiration as a whole well-thought-out-and-complicated decor scheme, but I like it so that’s what you’re getting. I totally reserve the right to go complicated next year though if the mood strikes!
Here’s the living room.
Now that we have four people in our house, we decided it was time to trade up to a sectional. We got rid of the coffee table for now too because we didn’t love it anymore and it just wasn’t really baby friendly. It seems wrong not to have a coffee table to decorate, but I’m sure this phase will only last a few months!
Here’s the post about my living room from a few months ago, so you can see the difference the new sectional made. And this chair! Ack! I love it so much. I got to pick whatever fabric I wanted and I’m so glad I went just a little bit bold with this one.
I really love fancy and complicated Christmas trees, but I just don’t have the patience to do them myself at this point in my life. So even though we have 5 trees this year, they’re all super super simple. We don’t use the recommended 100 lights per foot of tree. In fact, I think there are probably only 2 strings of 100 per tree, plus some patio lights for fun. I really do love the look of letting the natural beauty of the real trees shine through though. I almost think I could not decorate them at all and I’d still love having them in the house.
All I did this year was put in a few berry picks to match the red berry wreaths I made a few weeks ago, and then I handed Kennedy the bag of red ornaments and said “this is the red tree”.
Nine year olds are the best! (Look at the socks :))
We thought we would make the fake tree in the dining room a red tree too to match. Kennedy did it in her own way. Oh well! That tree doesn’t even have a skirt on it and I probably won’t get around to finding one for it this year. Less mess though for sure!
Oh. and. This is super shameful. Baby Jack doesn’t even have a stocking out yet because I wanted to use these ones but I only have three. Oh well, I’ll put out a non-matching one for him on Christmas Eve and he won’t care. I would have put some fresh cedar into these for now if I had wanted to walk the 20 feet from my back deck to cut some. But I didn’t.
Don’t worry, the ladder is firmly attached to the wall! 🙂
We’re working on making the dining room presentable right now so I can only let you see a tiny bit. We’ll have to save most of it for a future post! You can see that I took these pictures the next day though and I had fixed up the tree a little by adding in some white berries and spreading the ornaments out. Also, the baby gate that Chris made from an old crib was up like it normally is.
That poinsettia is super fake, which works for me because that means that it will last more than three days.
We have another real tree in the kitchen. For this one I just handed Kennedy and her friend a bag of green ornaments and a bag of gold ornaments and said “Go nuts!” That’s my kind of tree decorating!
The girls got bored of decorating the tree eventually and I didn’t have time to finish the job, so I just stuck the extras in some containers on the kitchen desk.
And that’s pretty much it! Kennedy and Jack have little trees in their rooms, but Jack’s still isn’t decorated yet. Here’s Kennedy’s,
It matches her room, but other than that it’s pretty sad. I tried to get a nice picture of it but that angle just doesn’t exist!
Let’s look at Jack’s tree from last year now and pretend that it looks like that this year again because I loved that tree. 🙂
That was back when he was like 5 minutes old and slept all the time. Good times!
In years past I’ve done fun things in the mud room like this all red mud room.
And this tree farm inspired mud room.
But this year? Nothing. And my heart truly isn’t breaking over it. Sometimes you’ve just got to let go of all of your type A over-the-topness and just enjoy the season for what it is, right?
I’ll almost definitely return to my time-consuming decorating ways next year when Jack is in preschool, but for this year, I’m enjoying things just as they are. I hope you enjoyed your little tour too!
Have a great rest of the holiday season!
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.