Holiday Home

It was so much fun decorating for the holidays this year.  One of my favorite things to do is sneak out after Christmas and snap up decorations for pennies at all the post-holiday sales.  But I could never really indulge until now, because our house in Pembroke was so small that it would easily get overwhelmed.  Christmas morning last year was the toughest ever, because there just wasn't room for the five of us and the presents Santa had left.  There's only so much that an 11'x14' living room can handle!

But not this year!!  This year our house is so wonderfully open and spread out that everything fit perfectly and there was room for a few new ideas too!  I haven't managed to take pictures of everything, but these are a few (dozen) of my favorite things...





These candy colored ornament topiaries from Target are on their last legs, but I still love them so much!  (Marc loathes them, but luckily he loves me, so he leaves them alone)  I stuck them in the urns by the front door like always.



Lucky for me, Target also sells a garland that matches the topiaries, so I bought two of them and wrapped them around a wreath, with a glittery green ribbon as a finishing touch.  The candy colors make my heart happy! 





I hung three of these little wreaths from the lights on the garage.  I saw it on a neighbor's house and loved the look so I took the idea and ran with it!









This is one of my all time favorite posessions. I'd lusted after one like it in Exposures catalog that cost hundreds of dollars, but knew I'd never be able to spend that kind of money on something so frivolous. Then one day I was walking through Michaels and on a clearance table, there were two of these for 50% off!  I paid less than $100 for both and practically wept to the woman at the register about my good fortune.


One went to my mother that year for Christmas, and the other has sat in a box until now, because I never had enough room to display it!  This year, it went right in the center of the dining room table, with some favorite pictures from our family tree inside the frames. 



 Clockwise from top left are my paternal grandmother, Mary Josephine Sulllivan Egan circa 1940 with my father and his brother Tom in her lap; Jack at Christmas circa 2005; my father-in-law Philip Henry Mallett circa 1953(?) on his tricycle in Revere (Jack still maintains that this is a picture of him, the resemblance is so uncanny); my nieces Corey Elizabeth and Abigail Veronica circa 2000.

 It took some gumption, but I finally hung this mirror by myself one day a few weeks ago.  And a gilded garland was just what it needed to spiff it up for the holidays.

This is the 7 foot slim tree that graced our living room last year because it was all that would fit.  This year I put it up as a second tree in the dining room to shine through the front bay window.  I decided it would henceforth be our "Massachusetts" tree and that we would put our few cherished Massachusetts ornaments on it, adding to it each year.  This year's addition was something I'd seen in a catalog years ago, and that my heart needed to have here in our new home ... It's a handpainted ornament of our house on Edgewater Drive from Personal Creations.

We had so many Christmas cards this year that I ran out of clothespins!  I'd started this way of displaying cards a few years back because of the lack of space in our old house.  Now I have more space, but I still love the way it looks to have all those wonderful, holiday wishes and beautiful,smiling-faced pictures draped on long strands of ribbon.  The stairs were the perfect spot!

 These incredible lighted garlands were a housewarming/Christmas gift from my parents. 

They go up the entire length of the stairs and are so beautiful I want to leave them up all year!! 

 The kids had such fun cutting snowflakes out of paper.  I did the folding and the marking, and they did the cutting - even Ben!  I used dental floss to hang them from the ceiling and love the magical way it looks.  You could decorate an entire house with these and nothing else, made out of whatever scraps of paper you have on hand - newspaper, printer paper, construction paper - the possibilities are endless!

 

Some potpourri laced with glittered pinecones from our holiday craftiness last year.  It made the whole kitchen smell delicious!  And it's sitting on some supercheap felt placemats I scored at Homegoods - they were two dollars each and I was so sad there were only two!

I love Santas! 

This one is a baking Santa from Michael's after-Christmas sale two years ago, and he's perfect in my kitchen.

I think he gave us good luck with all our baking this year! 

I don't have a good picture of our entire living room tree (yet), but I did manage to catch a quick shot of this beautiful "new home" ornament that my brother and sister in law gave us to help celebrate our first Christmas in Illinois. 

It was a magical one for sure, made even more so by celebrating with all our family and new friends in Illinois, and now a trip back to Massachusetts to celebrate with all our family and lifelong friends. 

I don't know when I'll be forced to take everything down, but I'm thinking there's nothing wrong with a Valentine's Tree, or maybe a Saint Patrick's Day tree?