Blue Cottage Christmas Home Tour 2014

After showing you the outside of our Blue Cottage, it’s time for the Blue Cottage Christmas Home Tour!

I decorated the downstairs and love how it turned out.

Notice the new vintage trunk table? I exchanged our larger trunk coffee table for this one. I had had my eye on it for months at the Newburgh Vintage Emporium and finally bought it when it went on sale.

I opened all of our boxes of Christmas decor and used most of what I already had, except for a few new things from Target and Pier1.

Unwrapping and setting up the little hand-painted angels from Germany is always a favorite of mine. My mom sends us a new one every Christmas, so the little orchestra is growing every year.

I had a gold and silver Christmas theme in mind for this year, and using the large gold tray behind the new felt wreath from Target was a great idea by my friend Kelly.

I wanted to stay away from red on the mantel, so I pulled together all kinds of other things in the house and ended up with a gold and brown and white theme.

I like all the different heights of the items.

I found this cube after last year’s Christmas at Goodwill, and it ties in with L’s vintage Tonka truck on the mantel.

The Joy pillow is new from Target.

My table setting is pretty simple and so affordable: the white snowflake placemats are from Pier1, as well as four big and four small white plates that were on clearance.

I was going to buy cloth napkins and napkin rings, but then I saw those red napkins with a knot for $3.95, and that eliminated the need for napkin rings.

Even better! I added a silver bell to every napkin as a little gift our guest can take home.

The water glasses appealed to me because they have bubbles in the bottom that look like snow, which tied in with the snowflake theme. They were also on clearance for under $5 each, and I paired them with wine glasses we already had.

The placemat under the cloches is from Target and I picked it up because of my gold and silver theme.

And I wanted to do something really simple and easy to do as a centerpiece with my three cloches: I added some fake berries from Target (the box cost $6), a couple of silver and gold star ornaments, and paper gift tags from Pier1.

I also added the same gift tags to the wreath on our mantel to tie those two things together.

I bought five $1 red bows for our porch and then thought they’d look cute on our dining room chairs instead.

I really wanted a gold and silver Christmas tree this year, but L was so excited to decorate it that everything ended up on the tree again.

Every single ornament we own, plus a few new ones from our trip last weekend to see Don’s cousin in Pennsylvania. And a new elf glass ornament from Pottery Barn.

The Colonial Williamsburg ornament from my amazing trip with Benjamin Moore also found a special place. We ate at the restaurant that had plates with that emblem, so I bought it to always remember that trip.

I decorated our kitchen with a few ornaments and some greenery.

I have a tendency to like it simple and then the collector in me wants to use everything I have, but I usually know when to stop, when more would be too much.

Some extra bells ended up in these three tall candle holders on our kitchen table.

The first thing L and I actually did was set up our many Christmas houses — all from Goodwill — and you should’ve seen how excited he was to help. He was ready to jump out of his skin with happiness and said something like, “This is the best day ever.” So sweet.