I just went back and looked through a couple of old posts from back in the days when I did full-fledged Christmas house tour blog hops, and…this isn’t a post like that. But it is a post about Christmas decorations! The nice thing about having done all those tours for all those years is that I now have a pretty big stash of Christmas decorations, so it’s fairly easy to drag some boxes up from the basement, pull some stuff out and makes things festive. But not overwhelming.

The title works two ways! Like maybe you are overwhelmed by the actual task of decorating for Christmas or maybe having too much Christmas exploding all over your house overwhelms you! Either way–we don’t have that here.

(affiliate links ahead; if you buy something after following my links I make some pennies, but you don’t pay anything more)

We do have some problems figuring out how to edit the photos so they don’t look crooked in my sunroom where there are so many lines going in all different directions! I did my best.

Anyway, in the sunroom we have the travel tree! I’ve blogged about the travel tree before; it is, as you might expect, a travel-themed Christmas tree. (Looking at THAT old post makes me want to go take more, better pictures of the tree this year. I’m a little out of practice with house photography). Anyway, that we get to decorate while remembering all our travel memories. We used to buy a lot of magnets on trips, and one year, overwhelmed (there’s that word again) with the sheer number of magnets we’d collected, I came up with an idea to turn them into ornaments. I blogged about that here, but, basically, I bought wooden craft rounds, spray painted them black, and added magnetic tape to them. Bonus is that you can switch out the magnets every year and they can still do magnet-y things like hold paper to your refrigerator when they’re not on a Christmas tree.

But also we’ve finally given up buying magnets everywhere we go in favor of buying actual Christmas ornaments. We can’t buy as many ornaments as we used to buy magnets, because magnets are cheap and ornaments are expensive, generally speaking…but we buy a few every big trip. Like this past summer we went to Newfoundland, and came back with this mummer ornament, which Dave didn’t really want because he found it creepy, but he was outvoted:

What’s that you say? You don’t know what mummers are? Allow Wikipedia to explain it to you:

Mummering is a Christmas-time house-visiting tradition practised in Newfoundland and Labrador, Ireland, City of Philadelphia, and parts of the United Kingdom.

Also known as mumming or janneying, it typically involves a group of friends or family who dress in disguise and visit homes within their community or neighbouring communities during the twelve days of Christmas. If the mummers are welcomed into a house, they often do a variety of informal performances that may include dance, music, jokes, or recitations.

Also we saw a cathedral and got this one:

In 2022 we went to Glacier National Park and found this adorable bear:

It’s smiling at us!

And we’ve been to Nashville a good bit lately since Milo is at Vanderbilt, so we figured we should probably get an ornament from there, too:

We seem to like woodcut ornaments. We have this one, too:

I’m not going to show you the live tree in the den yet (or maybe ever!) because it’s not decorated yet. I think we’ve decided to wait a few days until Milo gets home for break. Also because we accidentally bought a sort of comically short tree. I always try to buy the fattest tree in all the land because we have lowish ceilings but a big bay window for the tree…but this year the fattest tree also happened to be a bit tiny in the other direction. It was supposed to be a 6-7′ tree, but I think this tree is about as close to 6′ as Tom Cruise is. For example. Anyway, one tree is enough for one blog post!

Also in the sunroom we have a few other not overwhelming Christmas touches. Like this garland

that I got on clearance last year from World Market and also that truck from Target a few years ago:

Oh! You can still get the garland, only not on clearance right now (I mean, as I’m writing this. I don’t know if it’s on clearance when you’re reading it. There’s no way for me to know!)

Then we can stop by the dining room and see the cigar box manger scene:

…on the way to the foyer, where I switched out fall stuff for Christmas stuff:

Trees and houses are Target finds from years past again, I printed out old sheet music and framed it, and then a thrifted nativity. And books. There are two copies of A Christmas Carol. And a green book that’s not Christmassy.

And, finally, the kitchen, where I put out the cocoa station (after a surprising number of early requests from my adult children):

The snowman mugs are Williams Sonoma by way of the thrift store.

And then the copper shelves, another area that almost always gets something for Christmas…because it’s super easy to switch a few things out.

 

I have so many pictures of these shelves with different seasonal decorations! There are a lot more ghosts of Target Christmas past here, along with my beloved thrifted elves. I nearly forgot to bring them out this year! The horror!

Oh! A couple of years ago I mentioned that I had found the most incredible Santa Rainbow Unicorn arch inflatable EVER, but that I hesitated too long in buying it and it was out of stock everywhere. I’m extremely happy to report that I finally scored one and it’s hanging out in my front yard right now!

And with that I will, like Santa, wish you a magical Christmas!