Saturday afternoon, I was all ready to make a trip to Target to check out Christmas stuff then come home to finish decorating the kitchen in preparation for this post. Only I couldn’t find my keys. I spent ALL AFTERNOON searching for them everywhere I could think of. They weren’t under any couch cushions. They weren’t in the ignition. They weren’t in the trash can. They weren’t under the piano. They weren’t in a pocket of any coat or jacket in the house.

Do you want to know where they were?

They were in a pocket of the bag I carry with me everywhere I go. The same bag I searched through at least half a dozen times. And somehow missed the keys every single time. DAVE found them! Dave, who can never find anything, largely because he still hasn’t learned that things can be underneath other things (a blind spot he’s passed on to most of the kids)

What I’m getting at is that I wasted a whole day not decorating for Christmas, and I didn’t make it to Target until late-ish Saturday night. And Target is really dead on Saturday night, incidentally.

But! I persevered! I have a Christmassy kitchen to show you today! I’m sharing it as part of the Very Merry Christmas Home Tour, hosted by Carrie over at Lovely, Etc. If you’re coming over from Thrifty and Chic–welcome! And make sure you stick around until the end and follow the links for EVEN MORE Christmas decorating inspiration.

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

I find myself going back and forth with Christmas decorating between doing lots of black, white, and gold rather than traditional colors and going super festive with red and green all over the place. Apparently this is a red and green kind of year. Relatively, at least.

Red and green APPLES, even!

It’s also a very Target kind of Christmas, although I didn’t necessarily mean for that to happen. Maybe I was just in the mood to shop, after a day of key hunting, but I left Target Saturday night with quite a few of the things you see in this post.

If you read my “Seasonal Decorating for the Perpetually Overwhelmed” post, you know that one of my go to spots for decorating is the copper shelves in our kitchen. So I dutifully took down the Halloween stuff and added some Christmas up there:

I put the Christmas dishes my mom gave me last year up here, so that we can actually use them. The deer salt and pepper shakers are from Target a few years ago. I can’t remember where those penguins come from, but Gus gave them to me for Christmas a few years ago. I just found that little book at a library book sale a couple of weeks ago. And a mini Christmas village on a cake stand? Why not, right? And those elves are my Christmas favorites; they show up somewhere or other every year:

For years I’ve done a hot chocolate station every winter, and for years I’ve used this up cycled Santa tray for it:

But this year I had something new to show off on the hot chocolate tray, in the form of these thrifted Williams Sonoma snowman chef mugs:

Until I found these mugs for $3.99 at Goodwill, Williams-Sonoma was familiar to me mostly because of the annual Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog by Drew Magary for Deadspin (I won’t link to it, because I learned on Twitter that Deadspin is bad now and no one works for them anymore, including Drew Magary). But now I don’t understand how anyone could possibly hate the Williams-Sonoma catalog, because, at some point, it had SNOWMAN CHEF MUGS in it. And they are adorable.

Anyway, this whole Christmas kitchen tour post is really just an elaborate excuse to show you my snowman mugs. Here they are again:

And here’s the whole hot chocolate station:

Oh, I forgot to explain about why I brought up the Santa tray. Santa tray + snowman chef mugs would have been too much whimsy (or too much red), I decided, so I bought this white tray from Target instead, because I knew it wouldn’t try to steal the spotlight like that attention hog, SANTA, amiright?!

Then I tossed some more penguins in there, some canisters with mini-marshmallows and hot chocolate mix (I use this very simple Martha Stewart recipe) and a little Dala horse. And that sign from….Target again. It has 4 double sided prints so you can switch the design out constantly. Here’s what’s on the back right now:

I’m thinking it will be handy to have that frame (with an open top to slide cardstock prints into) around all year round to switch out designs in. Fun!

Then I moved way outside of my comfort zone by adding a little bit of Christmas to a random spot on my counter! Whoa! So daring.

The tree is from (wait for it) Target, and the sheet music is a project from a few years ago.

I meant to do a whole table setting on the kitchen table, but then I…forgot. I realized it when I was sitting down to edit pictures, but by then the light was fading and I was tired, so….imagine a beautiful table setting all around this middle bit:

Oh, things get very Target-y here! The sleigh, the penguin, the table runner, and those trees! I love those trees the most. But also the penguin. I thought I’d fill the sleigh up with ornaments, but then it seemed so obvious–even the picture on the tag showed it filled with ornaments.

So I spent an hour making teeny tiny fake presents and wrapping them in vintage wrapping paper instead. I had a couple of appropriately sized boxes around (the ones the refills to scotch tape come in, for example), but for most of them I printed out a template to fold cubes from cardstock and made the tiny boxes myself.

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that box of vintage wrapping paper that I bought at a garage sale probably 20 years ago. It’s even MORE vintage now than it was then!

so there you have it–Christmas in the kitchen! The rest of the house will have to wait for after Thanksgiving.

Now go check out Chatfield Court’s Christmas decor and then take some time to look at the other posts!

Monday

Lovely Etc * Thrifty and Chic * Boxy Colonial * Chatfield Court * A Brick Home

Tuesday

The Striped House * Casa Watkins Living * Up to Date Interiors * Our House Now a Home * All Things With Purpose

Wednesday

Green With Decor * Lehman Lane * Jonesville * Sweet Pea

Thursday

DIY Beautify  * What Meegan Makes * Sunny Side Design * Bright Green Door

 

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