Affiliate links ahead! If you buy something after following one of my links, I get a small commission but you don’t pay anything extra. Thanks for supporting Boxy Colonial! 

This is the first year in a long, long time that I haven’t joined in with any blog hop type Christmas tour posts, and I feel kind of sad about it. I just wasn’t feeling up for committing to anything in particular at any particular time this year. I’m such a free spirit/procrastinator.

But! I decorated! And I took pictures, even. I had a bit of trouble getting motivated this year, but once I got going I enjoyed it, and it’s very nice now having the house all Christmasified.

(I would like to take a moment here to mourn the Christmas decorating that didn’t happen. A few weeks ago, Facebook, in all its consumerist wisdom, showed me an ad for Christmas inflatable featuring Santa riding a unicorn next to a rainbow archway. It was amazing. But also expensive, so I fretted for a bit about whether to order it or not. I kept coming back to it, though, and noted that it was starting to sell out some places. So I panicked and ordered it from Wayfair. The next day I got an e-mail that it was sold out and the order had been cancelled. I tried Michaels, and the same thing happened. It seems that I am not the only person to recognize the majesty of the Santa Rainbow Unicorn inflatable. Now it’s sold out EVERYWHERE, and I don’t have one. I am very sad. But I am bravely trying to carry on and not let it ruin Christmas).

So! I was into green this year. I didn’t buy anything new; I didn’t even take the traditional Target trip to browse decorations because 1. we’re trying to lay low between Thanksgiving and New Year’s as much as possible and 2. I have ENOUGH stuff. I also went relatively minimalist this year.

I’m very pleased with my copper shelves.

Even though I didn’t go to Target this year, there’s a lot of Target here. The little houses, the ceramic trees, the cake stand (which I meant to put something on top of, but I couldn’t think of anything, and then I got distracted and moved on), and the gold penguin.

And a hot cocoa station:

Tragically, I noticed that one my thrifted Williams Sonoma snowman mugs has a little chip on the bottom. Alas.

Over there next to the stove is our early grown-up Christmas present, a Ninja air fryer oven. Perhaps I’ll write more about when we’ve had it longer, but for now I’ll say that we’re using it a ton (we mostly got it for the trailer, where we don’t have a real oven–only a convection microwave thing that we really only use as a microwave, so I’m surprised it’s getting so much use in the house)…and that it’s way bigger than I expected. It proudly proclaims that it will cook a 12 pound turkey, so I’m not sure what I was expecting–some kind of tardis-like oven that I could fit a whole turkey inside of but would somehow be the size of a toaster on the outside? Anyway, now my counters are even more crowded, but we can air fry things. Like turkeys.

I didn’t do much to the dresser in the foyer. I had kind of a fall woodland thing going from Halloween, which segues nicely into a winter woodland thing, although you have to switch out your skull under glass for cute little deer under glass):

And moving on to the den….there’s a Christmas tree!

We try to buy the fattest tree we can find every year, because we only have 8 foot ceilings, but we have this big bay window area for the tree, so I want it to be as big as possible in one direction anyway. But this year the nursery was very low on fat trees. This one looked fat in comparison to the others, but when we got it home it was kind of…not very fat. Oh well; it’s still pretty!

We have another tree in the library, but it’s still waiting to be decorated, so it doesn’t get to be in this post.

And then I gave a bit of attention to the mantel and the corner shelf:

Some years I put a TON of stuff on that corner shelf, but this year I just made it advent calendar central. I will try to do an actual (late) post about the DIY advent calendar, but basically there’s a house from my little Christmas village in each of those boxes, and the kids take one out and decide where to put it every day:

And Abe spotted this Eric Carle calendar on Amazon and wanted it, so we got that, too. It has a little paper ornament to hang on the tree every day:

Some of my favorite things didn’t even make it out this year, and I have to keep telling myself that this is okay. Minimalism! Sort of. You can’t really look at my den and believe that I’m actually a minimalist.

Maybe you would like to pin this?