14 ways to have a fresh and festive holiday

My all time favorite holiday in the year is Christmas.

Our family loves celebrating the birth of Christ.

We try to get our home ready for this beautiful season early and do our best in dilly-dallying to delay putting away all the decorations in January.

In celebration of all things Christmas here are 14 ways to get your home looking (and smelling!) fresh and festive this Christmas…

1. Get the home smelling ‘Christmas-sy’ with some Apple Cinnamon Scentsy bars or go natural…boil some water with a few slices of lemon( or orange), a few sticks of Cinnamon and a few Cloves in the same.
2. Fill a quilted sleeve with some pot pourri and seal it up well. Then the next time you take a hot pan off the stove, place it on the sleeve and it will effuse warm fragrant scents through the home.
3. If you have young ones at home, who can use kid proof scissors, help them create snowflakes. Draw out a template and then fold the snowflake in half and let them cut little squares, circles or slithers. Open out the sheet and you will have some pretty snowflakes. You can stick these on the balcony doors, windows or just hang them on a ledge.
4. We love Crayola’s Window Crayons. Bunny girl and I love drawing Christmas trees and mistletoe sprigs on our windows.
5. Decorate with bows…we have a bunch of Christmas bows that we love to go to town with. We hang bows on the door ledges, curtain frames, on every door, even on our kitchen cabinets. The overall look is always very festive!
6. Back home, during our honeymoon we’d picked up beautiful pine cones from the forest. A week before we put up our Christmas decorations, we spray painted a handful of them in silver and placed them in a coir bowl as a centerpiece for our table. We threw the unpainted ones under the tree to give an overall natural ‘out in the woods’ look.
7. You can also use the left over Christmas ornament balls and throw them into a wide open mouthed glass vase or a bowl and place them on the side tables with a tinsel placemat.
8. Get the little ones to help with the decorating. Pinterest has some awesome Christmas Craft suggestions. The work the little ones do may not be perfect but they will be treasured in the years to come!
9. Christmas is never complete without a Nativity Scene. As a little girl, Bunny girl would pull out her toys and re-create the Nativity Scene near the tree. This always looks so precious especially as the stable animals are members from Sesame Street!
10. Oh and Christmas always means you have to have tinsel on the tree. (You can choose to put up an artificial tree or maybe a fresh pine from here.) We love the reds and golds…always makes the tree look grand and reminds us of Christ’s royal heritage and the birth of a King.
11. Our tree also has an angel on the tip of the tree. We generally get the oldest and the youngest member of the family, place the angel on the tip together. The angels remind us of that heavenly chorus that day in Bethlehem.
12. We also love placing a set of golden bells over one door’s arch to symbolize the ringing in of Christ’s birth
13. Many homes also place a star outside the home as a reminder of the Star that led the Wise men and the Shepherds to the stable.
14. And finally how could I ever forget about a Christmas wreath. The bigger the better…placed right outside your door. What a great way to invite your guests into your warm festive home.

Decorating one’s home during Christmas is fun and it’s even more meaningful if you can tie in elements of the Christmas story with Christ’s birth to remind especially little ones that Jesus is the reason for this season.

**EBMR Disclaimer: This post has been inspired by Hayes, but the heart is all mine!**