Today I’m really excited to link up with Victoria and Sarah to share our Christmas decorations! I try to keep it somewhat simple since our place is so small so that you don’t feel like you just walked into a crowded Christmas gift shop, but I also like to try to find ways to incorporate seasonal touches throughout. It was really fun to get to decorate with my parents this year.
Our Decorations
Our tree is supposed to be a “skinny” tree for a normal house, but for our space it’s the perfect normal full size. Our ornaments are a collection of a lot of donations from my mom’s collection that were “my” ornaments before, a lot of wedding-gifted ornaments, and a few we’ve collected in our three years together. Ornaments are such a good idea for a wedding gift, y’all! An empty tree is sad, and those wedding ornaments are really special. My mom even got us one that is a perfect replica of our wedding cake. Find it near the top!
Waaay down on the bottom there is a new ornament from this year: our Mount Vernon ornament!
We start the trimming process by filling in the more bare spots of the tree with some sparkly poo-kee-doos that we hook around the “trunk” of the tree. See the sparkly stuff sticking out? Then we wrap pearl and iridescent beaded garland around, which is always the hardest part, isn’t it? We also have some “filler” ornaments that are gorgeous gold bows my mom let me take, because I love them so much. And finally, we have a bunch of hodge podge personal ornaments that tell our story! That’s what I love about trimming the tree so much. It’s like a charm bracelet of personal memories and identifiers. We have all the schools we’ve graduated from represented, my sorority, several ornaments with photos to commemorate certain years, lots of mementos from places we’ve visited, hobbies, favorite pop culture icons, etc.
At the base of our tree, I put down this cute tartan tree skirt just on the floor to protect our rug and then the tree sits in this darling barrel stand I got several years ago from Ballard Designs. It’s hard to see when the tree is set up, but I really love it!
On our table, I fill our centerpiece with these sparkly ladies from Pier One, and our hurricane lanterns get gold filler ornaments.
One of my favorite touches is this little mismatchy Nativity scene I “made” over the years at church camp when I was a kid, meaning we did some sort of painting and varnishing process to the figurines.
I do my best to add touches to the kitchen. We also have holiday hand soap and a Christmas oven mitt, so we’re really going all out.
Then we have a gold Nativity scene in our bedroom too.
I really wish we had stockings, but without a real mantle, it may just have to wait until our next place. Pippa is bummed about it too. She wants a stocking full of treats.
Establishing Some Christmas Traditions
Our perpetual city lights just add to the festivity.
Will and I both feel very strongly that it’s important that we establish some Marks family Christmas traditions to do every year. I even keep a running Google doc of ideas for the various holidays. The hard part for us right now is that we can’t guarantee when or even where most of these things are going to happen with our travel schedule changing every year. So we can say we want to go to the Nutcracker every year, but last year it was in DC, and this year we’re going in Charlotte. We also can say we want to bake Christmas cookies for our doormen and dog walker, but we don’t know if we can say when that will happen. I’m trying not to be so Type A about traditions that I let that bother me for now. 🙂 Some of these things we’ve already started and some are new ideas!
- Buy at least one new ornament for each year.
- Drive around to look at Christmas light displays.
- Go ice skating (into January and February too!)
- Make Christmas cookies for people in our building while watching a Christmas movie marathon!
- Create a Christmas card garland.
- Do Advent devotionals each night before bed.
- Go see the Nutcracker.
- Make cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning!
We already know we’ll want to add opening one present on Christmas Eve that is Christmas pajamas and an Advent calendar each morning when we have more Markses in the house someday, but these definitely keep us busy for now!
This is last year’s holiday card garland, because we don’t have enough yet this year!
Here’s what our decorations look like at night.
What are your Christmas traditions?
