Holiday Home Showcase

Hello & welcome to the Holiday Home Showcase! All week long I’m sharing different rooms in our home for the holidays. Yesterday was our first Christmas home tour for 2016, you can check it out here.  Today, I am so excited to be joining some of my blogging besties for another holiday tour.  These girls are my true life friends!  We all finally met (after meeting over a year ago on Instagram) in Atlanta at the Haven conference this past summer and have become the best of blogging friends ever since! I pretty much love them to the moon and back!

Our fabulous host, Kelley at KelleyNan rounded us all up to welcome you into our homes this holiday season.  Be sure to visit her gorgeous home and the rest of these fabulous bloggers at the end of my tour.

If you’re stopping over from Bree’s home at ZDesign At Home, I’m so happy you’re here! Doesn’t she have great style?  Have I mentioned how much I LOVE browsing through Christmas home tours? I could get lost in everyone’s homes for hours on a cold winter evening by the fire. I look forward to it every year and am excited to actually be participating in these home tours for my second year now.  I hope you’ll have fun touring our home today.  Let’s start in the kitchen.

Serving bowl

When we built this home I made sure our electrician put outlets on top of my cabinets just for lighting up my garland. Unfortunately you can’t see the twinkly lights in this photo with the sun shining in, but they are so pretty and festive all lit up in the evening.

In all honesty, I’ve been wanting to replace those chandeliers for a while now since my style has evolved. But then I think of my garland and how much I love to adorn the chandeliers every year. I’ve styled them the same for 6 years in a row. Maybe next year they will be different…for now, I’m still loving.

There’s a story to tell about my pink poinsettia. I’m actually not a big fan of poinsettias but when I saw the beautiful shades of pink on this one, I couldn’t resist. When I bought this beauty it was huge! Are you wondering why it’s not looking so big now? Well, on the drive home from the store I had set it on the back seat.  When I almost ran a red light on the way home, but slammed on my breaks instead, there went my beautiful poinsettia…upside down on the floor.  When I pulled it out of the car to assess the damage I was horrified. Every single beautiful bloom was snapped off (okay, maybe one was hanging by a thread).

I didn’t have time to go buy a new one, nor did I even want to after investing in this one. So I speed dialed my friend Erin, had a meltdown (that’s why I love this blogging group…they allow spontaneous blogging meltdowns and understand it fully..haha!).  We laughed and soon I felt much better. I put “Last Christmas” by Wham on my playlist and jammed out while I salvaged the pathetic site. I tucked in the broken blooms the best I could and quickly snapped a few photos.

I could have just eliminated these photos from the tour altogether but I wanted you to know that “perfect photos” aren’t always a reality.  Personally, I find beauty in the flawed and perfectly imperfect.

I even managed to make a pretty poinsettia table runner with the fallen blooms. It wasn’t so bad after all.

I may have stacked a step stool on top of a bar stool to adorn my stag head with ribbon and ornaments.  A ladder would have made so much more sense than my balancing act. This blogging business can be dangerous friends! I was totally winning on this day of getting good photos of our kitchen..haha!

I took the doors off of my cabinets last year so I could play around with decorating the shelves. As you can see, silver and gold is the color theme I chose this year.

Bottlebrush Trees

  

I even made you a red velvet cake! Confession…I don’t bake.  My version of bringing a pretty dessert to a holiday party is go to Walmart (the only time I go to Walmart) and buy their red velvet cake. Adorn it with flowers or snips of fir branches and there you go! You can see more of my cake decorating ideas {here}.

Let’s get out of the kitchen because that cake is making me hungry! Moving on into our upstairs loft.

Right around Christmas last year, I had sold all the old furniture up here and we had one lonely tree.  Now that we recently made over this area, we hang out here all the time.  The boys especially like it since it’s in their “zone.” I call our upstairs the boys’ zone.

We have a fun little deck just behind the tree there and behind the closed door is their boy lounge, AKA game room. One day I’ll show more of that space.  Our white Christmas tree that was in our basement family room (see it here) last year is the perfect fit.

We simply hung our old collection of red, green and gold ornaments and spiraled the red plaid ribbon from last year’s porch topiary trees. I love reinventing the old in a new way. I’m really drawn to simplicity this year in decorating.  I would even be happy with just a lit up tree without any decorations.

The “Joy to the World” globe was from Pottery Barn last year. I have what seems like 998 ornaments of all sizes so I tucked some cute mini ones into my topiaries.  Adds a little festiveness.  Occasionally I see a few on the floor. Maybe the boys are using them as targets for their nerf guns.

Pillows – Homegoods

This is the first year I’ve used blue in my holiday decor and I’m loving it. The red & white throw is actually a scarf from my closet. Big enough to wrap myself up in!

Gift Boxes

I’ve been more intentional with my gift wrapping this year and making sure each gift has a pretty ribbon and adornment. Most of my shopping has been done online (check out my Holiday Gift Guide if you need ideas!). I’m wrapping the packages as they arrive. Christmas Eve will be much more relaxed this year since I won’t be up until 2 a.m. trying to wrap everything at once.

That concludes today’s tour for the Holiday Home Showcase! Here’s a glimpse of yesterday’s Christmas home tour.  You can see more of it {here} but don’t forget to visit the homes I’ve linked below!

I’m decorating more rooms to share later this week and next.  Here’s a sneak peek of our master bedroom and another simple little tree.

And our family room…

Stay tuned for more Christmas tours of our home to come! At the bottom of this post you can subscribe to my blog to be sure you’ll never miss the excitement going on around here. There is something big on the horizon for this little blog of mine coming the beginning of 2017…you won’t want to miss!

A huge thank you to Kelley (Kelley Nan) for organizing and being our awesome host!

Next stop is the beautiful home of Decor Gold Designs. Jennifer’s home is so magical to me.

Be sure to visit the rest of these fabulous homes on the Holiday Home Showcase:

Decor Gold Designs | Randi Garrett Design | Haneen’s Haven | Driven by Decor | Citrine Living | Sunny Side Up | Kelley Nan | Z Design at Home

KITCHEN SOURCES: (complete source list HERE)

LOFT SOURCES: (complete source list HERE)

HOLIDAY DECOR IN THESE ROOMS (Scroll & click on image)

**Affiliate links used in this post.  Similar items sourced where original no longer available