2018 Christmas Home Tour

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Tour a traditional southern home decorated for Christmas with lots of colorful, vintage items. You’ll love the Santa-inspired front porch, the gold Christmas tree in the dining room, the vintage Shiny Brite tinsel tree and all the chinoiserie in the family room.

Our halls are decked, and we’re excited to celebrate the Christmas season with family and friends.

I’m also thrilled to welcome you to our (virtual) Christmas Home Tour for 2018.

I really enjoy decorating our home for Christmas, and I hope you’ll find some inspiration and ideas as you add festive touches to your home.

Use the links below to view our past Christmas Tours to see how our style and home has evolved:

• 2017 Christmas Home Tour
• 2016 Christmas Home Tour
• 2015 Christmas Home Tour
• 2014 Christmas Home Tour
• 2013 Christmas Home Tour

I love all things vintage, and our Christmas decor really showcases that, while also keeping true to our home and our sense of style. There are also a lot of family memories and stories wrapped up in our holiday decorations. Remember that as you decorate your own home for the holidays. If you love it, if it is special to you and your family, display it proudly, whether it’s on trend or not.

We’ll start the Christmas home tour on the front porch, just as you would if you were visiting our home in person.

If you want to see all the details of our vintage Santa-inspired Christmas porch, be sure to check out this post where I show you all the vintage details.

The porch is always one of my favorite spaces to decorate, and yes, I do leave all this stuff outside throughout the season. (We live in North Carolina, and the porch is covered and mostly protected from the elements.)

From the porch, you’l enter our foyer and dining room area, where you’ll get a hint at my favorite colors.

I love pink, aqua and blue. Felix, our tabby cat, rules the house, for sure. He’s always looking for light-drenched spaces where he can nap.

I’m glad he’s not one of those cats who likes to bat around Christmas ornaments on the tree.

My collection of (mostly) vintage Shiny Brite ornaments is definitely paws off! I love hunting yard sales, antique stores and thrift shops for these fragile glass treasures.

They share space on the aqua vintage buffet with some colorful bottlebrush trees and a collection of ceramic lambs.

The bottlebrush tree theme continues in our Christmas dining room.

You can see more of this space in my Christmas dining room tour.

Next, we’ll make our way through the vestibule and into the living room.

These decorations were entirely accidental. As I was decorating the rest of the house, I’d been stacking this and that on the blue table here. I thought this unintentional tableau of vintage and thrifted items was pretty, so I snapped a shot.

I’m particularly enamored with the way my DIY bejeweled wreath looks hanging on the horse sculpture.

From here, we head into the living room where you can see our 9-foot tree, decorated in pops of pink, aqua and gold.

I can’t get enough of those colors!

From all the glitter and jewels, it’s pretty obvious that I like things that sparkle and shine.

Give me all the jewels…

and all the brass…

,,, and all the sparkly glass…

…and I can’t forget about mercury glass.

We have one of those “open concept homes” that are all the rage on HGTV “House Hunters.”

One living space flows into the next, and for the most part, I attempt to use cohesive colors throughout. But I wanted to introduce some red into our Christmas decor, so I went for it in our breakfast nook and keeping room.

I’m a traditional southern girl, so of course I love Blue Willow! Especially at Christmas.

I love how it looks with red and plaid.

The breakfast room is adjacent to our kitchen and keeping room/family room.

We spend most of our time here, cozied up in front of the fire and the TV.

We spend most of our time here, cozied up in front of the fire and the TV.

I told myself I was going to keep the mantel decor simple this year, but as with most of my attempts at simplicity, that didn’t happen.

I just kept adding more and more red and blue ornaments.

At least I kept things more subdued on the hearth.

Just a few pieces of pottery and a pair of gold deer decked out in blue velvet ribbon.

In decorating this room for Christmas, I was looking to highlight my collection of blue-and-white chinoiserie pottery with pops of holiday red.

Pay no attention to the back of the chair. It’s Felix’s favorite scratching post! (Grrr!)

I’ve loaded my estate sale empire-style sideboard with lots of blue-and-white porcelain pottery. The soup tureen was my grandma, but most of the other pieces I’ve found secondhand.

I’m always looking out for a deal, and I’m not afraid of a little work to get the pottery display ready.

Add a pretty red bouquet and some greenery, switch out the candles, scatter a few ornaments, and it’s a chinoiserie Christmas.

Not your traditional Christmas color scheme, but I love it!

I did not really decorate the kitchen this year; frankly we just ran out of steam. (But you can see it fancied up for Christmas in last year’s holiday tour.)

But I did spruce up the mug rack for Christmas with some stockings, festive mugs and plates, and a vintage-style wreath.

And I didn’t decorate the banister — because I used part of that garland on the fireplace mantel, and also because I’m 45 (almost 46) and tired!

But I did add a frosty little flocked Christmas tree in our master bedroom sitting area.

I love the snowy, woodland look beside the fireplace.

I was even able to use the snow-covered birch logs and pinecones I made.

I’ll be setting up shop soon in this space to start wrapping Christmas gifts. What Hallmark or Netflix Christmas movie should I watch while I wrap?

Thanks for coming along on our 2018 Christmas Home Tour. Merry Christmas and happy decorating!