Decorating for Christmas

You may remember from my series of posts last year The 12 Days of Kaelamas that I absolutely LOVE Christmas 🎄 I won’t be doing that series again this year because I felt it would be a bit repetitive, but that doesn’t mean I won’t still be writing Christmasy posts for the rest of the year! Anyway, it should come as no surprise that we have already decorated our home for Christmas this year. If you think it’s too early for Christmas, please just know that I come from a family where our house typically looks something like this:

So it’s practically in my blood to be AGGRESSIVELY CHRISTMASY!!! We recently moved into a new apartment and one of the most important parts for us was getting ready for the holidays. Today I’m sharing with you all the fun decor and things we used this year to get our new home ready for Christmas! A lot of the stuff we have is from years past, but I’ve tried to find links to all the stuff that’s still available 🙂

We’ll start with our front door, which we decorated with a beautiful festive wreath. I believe we got this from Target years ago – it’s been through like 4 apartments now haha

Our door mat is also from Target – if you don’t already know this about me you’ll quickly learn in this post that 90% of the items I own were purchased at Target!! Anyway I like this mat because it’s just festive enough without being so Christmasy that we can’t use it other times of the year.

Moving just inside we have some super cute banners on our windows that we found at the Target dollar spot last year. We have a Christmas tree one on one side:

and a fa la la one on the other:

You can also see our Christmas lights in that pic – we have those all around our entire living room but you’ll see that in a pic later! We also had a third little banner/garland thing that we hung above Chris’s desk. It’s little stockings and it’s so cute:

We have decorations on the windowsills too, with some cute little LED glowing lanterns and all our Christmas tsums on one side:

and some festive holiday blocks with another lantern on the other window.

I love those lanterns, they’re so cute and the flickering “candles” look really nice in the window!

On the couch in front of the window we have some festive pillows, including a Mickey one from the retro collection they introduced a few years ago. We also threw a red blanket on there to tie it all together.

I love throw pillows. I recently saw this one at Target that I LOVE and wanted so bad but I can’t justify spending $25 on a single pillow lol

Teddy not included as a piece of Christmas decor. Though we did get a really cute festive collar for him with some jingle bells on it….

Chris also has a nativity set that he puts up every year – this year it’s on our little cubby space next to the kitchen counter.

My favorite character is this brown cow.

Also on the counter we have our Christmas stockings! We got matching ones new this year, including a little one for Teddy 🙂

Our little stocking holders spell out JOY, which we bought only because it was the only set that came in 3 instead of 2 or 4 lol

And then at the entrance to the kitchen we have a little mistletoe ball hanging. It’s pretty cute:

Heading out to our balcony, we have another stocking of mine on the door handle because it’s cute and I didn’t want to get rid of it haha

For the balcony we kept it simple for right now with just some colored lights around the railing. I kinda want to get another small Christmas tree to go out there too but we’ll see…

Up on the biggest wall in the living room, we have a really cute decal:

We used the extra little Christmas light bulbs to decorate the other decor that we have up year round:

Our clock wearing a Santa hat is one of my favorite things haha

Here’s how it looks all together, complete with our Christmas lights on the ceiling:

I love it so much!!! We keep those Christmas lights up in the living room during non-Christmas too because it creates a really nice ambience. And also because we love Christmas. Here’s a better look at how they look all around the rest of the living room:

Moving in to our bedroom, we have a few Christmas things up in there too, starting with this cute little sign on the door:

Of course we have some lights up in there too – these will probably be left up all year as well because they’re really pleasant haha

Finally we have these super cute and festive flannel sheets from Target, and they’re so soft and cozy:

The pattern is so cute, I love it!!

Nearing the end here – we have a bunch of cute little random Christmasy things all around, like this festive dog and Christmas tree that decorate our router:

This Santa Duffy sittin on top of a bookshelf:

A lil snowman chilling on Chris’s desk:

And we have a set of 3 singing snowmen that dance together when you push a button, decorating various places:

It used to be a set of 4 but the keyboard player died last year. Rip. Also note the nutcrackers in the back of the first 2, and our wedding blessing from the Obamas there in the third pic haha

And of course, we always have a nice festive candle burning.

Our newest additions are from the Signature Soy line from Target that I talked about in my October favs post! We picked up 2 new scents recently, Balsam Fir and Buttered Rum. Both smell delicious and so Christmasy! I’m sure we will bust out the Bath & Body Works candles soon and inevitably pick up some new ones too haha

And FINALLY the most important part of our decor – our Christmas tree!

We’ve had this same tree for a few years and it’s not much, but it’s perfect for us. It’s my favorite part of our decorations! This year our tree is even better than it has ever been before though, and that’s because of this:

This is a smart plug and it’s amazing. It connects to our wifi and through an app I’m able to control things in our home – like turning the Christmas tree lights on and off – from my phone!!! It’s amazing!!!

Literally all I have to do is hit that button to turn the lights on and off. You can also set up a timer or schedule for the plug, like I have it set up to turn the tree lights on every day at sunset. I love technology!! We only have one of these plugs so far but I’m so in love with and amazed by it that I’ve already ordered more to use all over the house haha

Anyway – moving on to the actual tree itself! We have this super cute tree skirt that we got this year at Target. We also put some light up garland around the edge and it turned out super cute I think!

In the photo above you may have also seen that we have another decal on the wall behind the tree. Okay if you’re reading this after the original date of posting you need to know about this important edit…do not buy this decal!!! We put this up, took cute photos, I wrote this post, blah blah. Everything was fine. But literally the next day we went out in the living room and half the letters had fallen down!! It’s from the same brand as the “Merry & Bright” one up there so I don’t know why this one is so much lower quality. “Merry Christmas” quickly became ry histmas and several of our reindeer jumped to their deaths. Click here to see the tragedy! We’ve taken the words down now and tossed them, and only 2 reindeer and Santa remain. Just wanted to warn you guys in case you were planning on buying this one – skip it!!

The set also came with a little Santa cutout and some reindeer, but we decided to place those on the wall in the kitchen instead, and it turned out super cute! see above!!

Our tree is decorated with colored lights and just a few ornaments. We both prefer the ball-type ornaments to having a lot of random ones all over the tree, so it looks a little more classic. I still have one Ariel ornament on the tree though 😉 Honestly if we had more space we would definitely have a second tree so we could do different types of ornaments on both. I’ve always wanted a white tree too…listen, growing up in my house it was typical for my us to have 3 trees, so forgive me if you think I sound crazy for how much I love Christmas trees haha

And here’s how it looks all lit up. I love it so much!

And that’s all our Christmas decor this year! The only other thing I might add still like I said was another small tree on the balcony, but that will depend on if I want to spend any more money on Christmas decorations this year haha. I also definitely wanna get more smart plugs to use for Christmas lights and also everything else in my house!!!

I love how everything turned out and I’m so excited to celebrate Christmas this year. This is also Chris and my last Christmas together before we get married, so it’s particularly special and exciting for us! With wedding planning pretty much consuming our lives at this point, it was fun to take some time out to decorate so everything looks all cute and festive <3

I hope you enjoyed this post! Have you decorated for Christmas yet? Do you think we’re crazy for having our tree up before Thanksgiving? Let me know haha. Thank you for reading and I’ll see ya next time 🙂

<3 Kaela