2015 Guide to Holiday Decorating

Get ready -- here is this year's complete guide on one sentence.

Do Less, Enjoy More.

I love the holidays and I love decorating, but I'm tired. I'm tired of all the effort, the clean up, the cajoling hubs to line the entire roofline and every tree in the yard with lights, the frozen dead branches in January (or the naked ones in May :), the pine needles all over the house, the putting up and the taking down and I repeat, the clean up and the worry about the boughs on the mantle spontaneously combusting if the fire gets too hot. 

So this year, I've decided to lighten up - ALL of it. And, I'm excited to pick just a few things that I will do and we will enjoy and will welcome family and friends to our home this holiday season.

Outside, I've filled one (not 7) windowboxes with evergreen boughs, a few logs from the woodpile and twinkly lights. I've made a 'bouquet' in the basket of my much loved vintage green metal shopping cart.  There are 3 (not 30) strands of lights in total and I love them.  They looked so pretty last night after dark and I appreciated every twinkle! 

My rusty milk tin and this old window frame hold the rest of the boughs I cut from our own overgrown trees. And while I love walking in the woods this time of year, these boughs needed to be trimmed anyway, were already in our yard and look beautiful on our back step. I hung two huge rusty metal stars from a beautiful snowy celebration at school many years ago among the pine trees by the driveway.  They are lovely when the snow settles on them. 

Tomorrow, I'm going to visit the Christmas storage 'closet' under the basement stairs looking for a few bits that mean Christmas at our house. In a few weeks, we'll put up a tree that fills the house with the fragrance of evergreen, fill some bowls with old ornaments, build a cosy fire and set the table. It sounds heavenly to me!

And I think we'll be ready.  

xo

karon