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I’m not going to lie, my house has been decorated for Christmas for over a month now. But I’m still loving all of the magical touches throughout our condo. Now that I spend so much time at home (working here all day), I’m enjoying our holiday home even more. In fact, I usually keep our Christmas tree on all day long because I love the soft glow it brings to our family room…even during the daytime!
While I don’t have a ton of “new” decor and holiday items this year, I still wanted to share our Christmas home tour with you. I don’t swap everything out for holiday stuff, but it just goes to show that a few tweaks here and there can make a big difference. So let’s take a look at my Christmas home tour!
Casey’s Christmas Home Tour
People often ask me where we keep all of our Christmas stuff since we live in a small condo in the city. Finn and I actually rent a storage unit about a mile away and we keep all of our out of season items there (it also stores random items like my wedding dress and things from our childhoods). Finn and I hit up our storage unit in early November to dig all of our Christmas bins and tree out. This is usually when we’ll bring some of our patio furniture to be stored for the winter season. 
Quick Tip: We use red and green plastic bins to store all of our holiday decor. It makes it sooooo much easier to spot our Christmas bins in our storage unit and we can just grab them and go!
I then unpack all of the holiday stuff and take an entire Saturday to put up the tree and decorate throughout our house. I pack up decor/pillows/etc. that I’m not using back into the holiday bins and we take them back to our storage unit on Sunday so they don’t take up any room in our place.
Our Family Room
The main room gets the biggest transformation for the holidays. Between our tree, our Christmas card display, and our built-in decor…this is where the most holiday action happens!
As I mentioned in this post, I think faux greenery can go a long way to transform your shelves. You can leave a lot of your regular decor out and just tug little sprigs of greenery near them, along with some ornaments.
When my mom moved to the city, she purged a lot of her Christmas decor. I ended up taking the gingerbread house teapot (on the shelves above) as my one item from her. It has been in our family for years and I love the quirkiness it brings to our built-ins. 
In years past, I’ve had a lot of red on our shelves for the holidays. This year I decided to pare back on the red. it’s such a strong color and I wanted things to look a bit more muted. Most of my decor is dark green, white, and gold, with a few hints of red here and there.
I do have a hint of red on our stockings and on our tree. I used the same red plaid ribbon from our Dream Tree (from a few years ago!) and still love the traditional look it brings. On our fireplace mantle, I added greenery from Michaels and the same battery operated lights Bridget discussed in this post about her holiday fireplace decor.
Our Christmas Tree
Speaking of our Christmas tree, it has a new spot this year in front of our couch! You can see in last year’s Christmas home tour that we had it by the window behind the couch. But now that we have our record console there, we had to change things up. 
I really love the new location. I can sit on the couch and stare at it all night long. It’s just so magnificent at night!
We’ve chatted about it before, but Finn and I are not ones to have a perfectly matchy-matchy tree. Of course, I looooove the gorgeous styled trees that I see all over Instagram (and the dream tree we style every year!), but that’s not real life for us.
Instead, we love our Christmas tree because it’s filled with personal and sentimental ornaments. We always pick up a new ornament when on vacation (like the lemon ornament from Italy) and it makes decorating that much more fun. We get to re-live those trips over and over again. 
Maybe someday I’ll have a big house where I can do 2 trees…one that’s pretty & matching, and another for all of our old sentimental ornaments. Someday!
Displaying Christmas Cards
We still use the same chicken wire frame board to hold all of our Christmas cards with clothespins. I keep the extra mini clothespins in the ceramic Santa on our built-ins and whenever we get a new card I can easily pin it up!
Bridget and I found the wood frame at Michaels years ago, but we’re thinking we should DIY one next year! Building a frame and securing the chicken wire would be an easy project that anyone could get done in an afternoon. If you’re interested, maybe we’ll add that to our 2019 to-do list!
Our Master Bedroom
You guys already got a peek at our holiday bedroom in this blog post, but I’ll include some more pictures here.
So there you have it, my Christmas home tour for 2018! Now, I’d love to know…when do you take down your Christmas decorations? Finn and I are heading to Quebec City the weekend after Christmas, which is when I usually take everything down. Am I a big Grinch if I take them down the weekend before Christmas? Eek, we’ll see how the next couple weeks go before I decide!
Casey
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