It’s a little late in the season, but I’m beyond excited to share my Christmas 2021 home décor!
What makes this year’s décor so exciting? Well, Stephen and I finally went ahead and redecorated most of our house! Our old furniture was either hand-me-downs from relatives, Goodwill finds, or Ikea pieces from our college days that were barely standing. While most of the pieces by themselves were great, our house as a whole didn’t have a cohesive interior design “look”; something that Stephen and I both wanted.
After years of waiting and saving, we finally found new furniture that we love. Over the past few weeks we’ve worked hard to reorganize and rearrange our house in addition to decorating for the holidays. It felt amazing to turn our house into a relaxing oasis while also creating a Christmas paradise!
Without further ado, here is our décor for the 2021 holiday season.
Front Porch
This year, I chose to keep my porch décor almost identical to 2020’s.
A little real talk here- decorating for the holidays is expensive! In 2020, Stephen and I spent over $600 purchasing Christmas decorations for our new home. Since we already bought a lot of the basics last year, we set our 2021 budget to be a lot lower. This year, I wanted to focus on purchasing a high quality artificial tree as well as a few additions to our indoor Christmas décor. I chose to wait to purchase additional items for our porch because it was less important to me.
The only change I made from last year’s decorations was adding a small metal sign on my front door.
Bedroom
Just like with my porch, I chose to keep my bedroom decor simple and stuck to a similar design from last year.
While I positioned two black and white buffalo plaid accent pillows in the same arrangement as 2020, I switched up my accent pillow. I also added a husky stuffed animal.
To contrast with the neutral theme of the rest of the bedroom, I finished off my bed with a red buffalo plaid blanket. Instead of folding it in a square like I did last year, I arranged it to look like a bow. After all, bows are more festive for the holiday season!
Finally, I found an elegant white, gold, and silver holiday floral arrangement at Michael’s. I placed it in a glass vase on top of my dresser.
Dining Room
One of my goals while decorating this year was to keep our décor minimal in high-traffic areas like our dining room and couch.
In 2020, I went a little overboard decorating our dining room for fall and for Christmas. While the festive tableaus I set up on the dining room table looked beautiful, they were inconvenient. Our table was all but useless covered in piles of décor. It gold old really quick having to move piles of decorations around every time I wanted to eat a meal. Not to mention, we made a bad decision by setting up our Christmas tree up against the dining room table.
In 2021, I decided to go with a more subtle look. First, I gave our bookcase a little Christmas spirit by placing two holiday animals on the top shelf.
Next, I artfully arranged some Christmas florals in a vase on top of our piano. I then laid a buffalo plaid table runner across our new dining room table and topped it with a snowflake lantern and various glitter candles to create an elegant centerpiece.
I love the effect our simple décor created. Not only are our decorations less overwhelming, they allow us full use of our dining room!
Couch
Next I decorated my new favorite part of my house- my giant comfy couch!
I love decorative pillows, so I had a lot of fun picking out festive ones. To add a pop of color, I layered some red buffalo plaid pillows amongst simple white ones from Target that we plan to use year round. For extra festivity, I found a totally extra (but fantastic) glitter pillow from Michaels that perfectly matched my gold and white pillows from last year. A red and white lumbar pillow reading “Peace & Joy” brought the couch together.
Mantle
Our exposed brick fireplace has easily become my favorite part of the house. As such, I had to go all out decorating it!
Like last year, I hung up a few stockings and a festive gold tinsel garland. I added two buffalo plaid ornaments to tie in with the buffalo plaid pillows on the couch. I also framed our fireplace with two artificial poinsettias. (Fun fact: Stephen loved these so much last year, he left them out year round!)
Finally, I finished our mantle by artfully arranging several plaid and gold reindeer.
Media Center
Another area of our house that looks drastically different is our media center.
Last year, I didn’t have a lot of space to work with when decorating our media center. Since our old TV was standing directly on top of our old media center, I had no available surface to hold decorations.
This year, I placed a couple of gold candles inside festive holiday lanterns and put one on both ends of the media center. In the center, I created a custom candleholder by mixing some artificial pinecones with miniature ornaments on top of a decorative tray. Finally, I placed a cute word art tree from Michael’s to create some symmetry with our Nintendo Switch.
Christmas Tree
Finally, we’ve arrived at the ultimate piece of Christmas décor- the Christmas tree!
Decorating our 2020 Christmas tree ended up being pretty complicated. Since we bought a real Christmas tree, we had to arrange tree lights ourselves. I also chose to decorate with several homemade buffalo plaid bows. While the idea sounded great in practice, the bows were extremely frustrating to make. In fact, I got so frustrated, Stephen had to make them all himself!
This year, I decided to err on the side of simplicity by purchasing a beautiful white flocked artificial Christmas tree. Since the tree is more narrow than last year’s real one, we had enough room to put it on the side of our media center instead of in the middle of our dining room. That was a huge bonus!
I also decided to forego ribbons and stick to red and gold ornaments. They created a lovely contrast against the white tree and look even more beautiful when you turn on the tree lights!
Finally, we finished off our tree with a red buffalo plaid tree skirt.
Not only am I happy with our Christmas décor this year, I’m happier with our newly designed house. I’ve been looking forward to upgrading our furniture for years. It feels surreal that it finally happened. I’m beyond grateful that I get to spend Christmas in a home that I love.
