The Christmas Tree(s)!
When Corey and I were house shopping and walked into this house for the first time, we both knew immediately that it had the perfect set-up for a Christmas tree. The little nook behind our couch is the absolute perfect spot to put a tree – it can be seen from the living room, the dining room, and the top of the stairs (that’s important!), and it is right next to a window so we can see it when we pull into the driveway each evening.
Corey and I are fake tree people – we each had both fake and real trees growing up, and we agreed that the hassle of watering, cleaning, and disposing of a real tree is just not something we want to deal with every year. Plus, there’s just something about pulling out the same tree year after year that feels special to me. And it totally doesn’t hurt that I adore the look of flocked trees, and we’d never be able to have one if we had real Christmas trees! So, I just settle for pine-scented dish soap and countertop spray (thanks, Mrs. Meyers!) to get the Christmas-tree scent going through my house, and we stick to our fake tree.
We like to keep it pretty simple when it comes to decorating our main (yes, there’s more than one!) Christmas tree – white lights and gold, silver, and red balls of various sizes. It’s elegant, simple, and it makes me oh-so happy. And, of course, we have our ruffled tree skirt that I made last year!
We put our Christmas tree up on a pedestal that Corey built last year, because it’s a bit too short for our high ceilings on its own. We also stuffed the skirt with a duvet that we aren’t currently using so that it doesn’t hang awkwardly off the pedestal. It ends up creating the perfect space for lots of Christmas gifts, and they don’t have to look too crowded.
As you can see, we had to move our gold bookcase out of this nook before bringing the tree down – we would have had to completely cover it up if we left it there, plus we loved the look of having the mirror behind the tree last year, so we wanted to replicate that.
We brought the bookcase over to the other side of the room (because we didn’t have anywhere else to put it!) and I did what I could to make it a little more festive.
I had a lot of displaced ceramic animals and white vases from re-vamping the mantle and a few other things, so I created an all-white shelf on the bookcase. I love how it looks so much that I think it may be my goal to someday have enough ceramic animals and vases to fill the whole thing up! The only new thing on this bookcase is the adorable little gnome – he’ll only come out at Christmastime!
I didn’t have a ton of other Christmas decor to bring over here, but I made a few small changes, like filling our apothecary vase with sparkly vase-filler, adding some Christmas books and magazines, and tossing on a few other sparkly Christmas items.
And, like I mentioned earlier, the tree in our living room isn’t our only Christmas tree! We picked up a small, super-skinny tree from Target for a whopping $50 to put in our kitchen. It’s hard to get a Christmas feeling super Christmas-y, and in ours you have no view of the living room, so that takes away a lot of the fun. So, by adding a second tree in here we were able to bring some cheer into the kitchen as well, and it’s the perfect way to showcase our not-so-pretty ornaments. You know, the ones that are special or sentimental, but don’t necessarily match the stuff in the living room.
And of course we couldn’t resist a super cute furry tree-skirt for the bottom. It’s technically mean for those tiny little tabletop trees, but we didn’t want anything that covered the ground – just something to disguise the ugly stand. So, this little guy fits the bill perfectly!
So cute! And that concludes the tour of our Christmas trees. I’m pretty passionate about our trees (and, you know, all of Christmas in general) so I’m really excited to have two. We’ll probably add a third someday so that we can have some Christmas in our bedroom, too, but for now two (plus a ton of mini-trees scattered throughout the house) is enough!
Do you have more than one Christmas tree? How about your decorating philosophy – do you like to match ornaments, or do you go for an eclectic look? Anyone change up their tree decorations every year?
You know I love trees, too. Last year we had 7, but this year I only had energy for 5. Love yours!
Growing up our tree was always a collection of ornaments and there are special ones that I still look forward to putting on my parents’ tree every year (I’m sure my brother and I will fight over who gets them later in life). Chris and I have continued that tradition with the trees that we have had, using a collection of ornaments that are special to us. We have a smaller table top tree that has color coordinated ornaments that I like to change out every so often. Since it’s small its usually very cheap to fill it with new ornaments.
We just have a little 3′ tree in our condo, with all our bookcases, we haven’t really left ourselves room for more. I think Christmas is about all the memories of previous Christmases, and part of that is having a big jumble of ornaments on the tree. Plain old balls are only for filler in our house!
My mum has a system where she hangs the plain balls deep deep within the tree, just for the glinting and sparkle, and then all the actual ornaments are on the outside. She’s collected so many over the years that every single branch/sprig has an ornament, and some have two!