2019 Christmas Decor II

Hola everyone!  Christmas Eve is tomorrow, and all is ready at Maison Newton for a beautiful holiday.  I'll be making a pot roast Christmas but with my special "easy beef burgundy" gravy - soooo good! 

I wish everybody a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a wonderful prosperous and healthy New Year.

Here are the photos of the Christmas decorations in the kitchen and dining area.  As in the living room, nothing too extravagant, but just enough to add a little holiday fluff and color.

Below is the bookcase that provides me storage below for extra kitchen thingies and my cookbooks/recipe collection folder (you can never have too much storage), dressed up with a couple of cardinals, a "Hot Cocoa Express" metal truck on top, a little snow man that lights up, the second shelf hosts a votive candle holder, and on the bottom shelf is my cardinal snow globe.

Below is the tabletop display made up of two beautiful padded cardinal placemats (they're small, but I don't know what else to call them).  Two more of these were framed for the display above the console table in the living room.  I added two composite deer that have a wood finish I picked up 3-4 years ago on sale at Walgreens, and a pair of faux topiaries with a bit of red, black and white plaid ribbon added around the containers.  Those topiaries are probably close to 30 years old - a gift from one of my nieces.  They came from the old Bombay Company before that closed down.

Next is my little cardinal tree on the peninsula/breakfast bar that divides the kitchen proper from the dining room.  I should probably add a couple of stools to the breakfast bar - but I don't use it for just myself!

The south wall of the dining area opens to the side door to the driveway and holds a small built-in display case.  I put my Christmas cards in the shape of a Christmas tree on that wall each year:

And photos from around the rest of the dining and kitchen areas.  You'll notice that I love cardinals and squirrels :)

There's a bunny too, dressed with the requisite red winter scarf.  There are matching tiered shelves on the other side of the sink (corner sink and corner windows, they look cool but are impossible for me to reach to crank open or to clean unless I'm either kneeling on a board laid over the sink (ouch to my knees!) or on a ladder bending and reaching over (ouch to my back!)

2019 Christmas Decor

Could you tell I go nutso over decorating my Christmas tree from the photos in the last post?  LOL!

I did decorate elsewhere, too.  Some more photos.  I don't go overboard.  Some people have gorgeously decorated homes, but that takes a lot of time, effort and money to do it the right way.  Just as an example, take a look at the 2019 Kinwoven Christmas decor at Youtube.  I love how they decorate - but no way would I try to duplicate that in this small house.  Just buying the supplies alone would probably cost me a couple of month's worth of income.  I also have no grand staircases, no huge rooms and no 12 foot tall Christmas trees!  LOL. 

This year's mantle started out VERY plain:

You can't really tell, but that's a small runner of three cardinals on top of the mantel underneath the clock.  Compared to how the console table looked after I dolled it up:

I felt the mantel was just too plain to pass muster.  So I added a little of this and a little of that and voila, a new Christmas mantel was born:

I kept the candles in place, the clock and runner, and added:  two Christmas plates, the "Noel" and "Joy" ornaments, the antiqued Santa clause and the colorful boot music box/ornament on the right side of the clock.  Much better.

I pulled out the gold and silver sequined cushion covers this year I bought a couple of years ago from H&M Home online:

I kept the red accents going:  the two red velvet stockings trimmed in gold and green; the red table cloth on the table holding the tree; the red oriental rug; and on the sofa, the red cushion covers purchased last year from Bed, Bath & Beyond.  Touches of red are everywhere throughout the room except on the tree:

Pictures of cardinals replace the colors from this year's autumn decor.

Large cardinal art fills the frames above the console table, which is topped by a long cardinal decorated Christmas runner.  The chunky knit cozy afghan which I wrap myself in at night is once again on the sofa, and will stay afterwards until spring.  The lamps on the console table have red and green bulbs in them (you can barely see the colors in the daylight).

Outside again this year are two artificial trees decorated in multi-colored lights, a Christmas themed lantern, a natural wreath with a large red bow and a single strand of multi-colored lights, plus a colorful "stained glass" look light bulb in the porch light that goes on over the weekends between sunset and the time I retire for the night.  The tree lights are on for six hours so they go out automatically on a timer at about 10:30 p.m.  I turn the lights on the wreath on and off manually.  That's it for outdoor decorations, plus the Christmas tree placed in the window.

Inside, I place battery operated candles in the windows on the front and sides of the house.  I also add some Christmas decor to the kitchen.  I'll show those touches in a separate post.

All in all, I don't decorate every square inch of the house.  I just spend a lot of time putzing with decorating the tree every year!  I pretty much use the same decorations year after year, slightly rearranged.  This year I added some new cardinal pictures printed from the internet and framed others that I already but hadn't used before.  I even pulled out of storage my battery-operated cardinal snow globe this year and put it on the bookshelf in the kitchen.  It runs and the "snow" gets circulated in the water inside the globe, but it is noisy so I normally don't have it on.  A pair of cardinals sit inside of it snuggling up to each other, so cute!   A few photos tomorrow of the dining area/kitchen Christmas decor will wrap it all up tomorrow.