how to decorate a christmas tree

How to decorate a Christmas tree

Growing up, decorating the Christmas tree was one of my favorite traditions – we’d put on Perry Como Christmas music, eat gingerbread cookies, and help my mom sort through our hundreds of ornaments. My parents always get an enormous tree, and the time, care, and decorating skills my mom puts into her tree is enough to rival the Rockerfeller Center’s tree!

Even though my mom has hundreds of ornaments, each one has a special meaning or memory – the nostalgia surrounding the holidays is so powerful, isn’t it?

While I can never come close to my mom’s tree, I do have some skills up my sleeve that I’d love to share with you. There are a few key elements that most people often overlook, so just follow my simple steps to add some “wow” factor to your tree.

While we only used about half of the ornaments we have, and we only put a couple of our most special delicate ones out (2 kids, 1 baby, 2 kittens…), you can still make a great impact with non-breakables!

Check out: DIY gift wrap | DIY painted ornaments | Gift guide for kids and toddlers

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Feminine baby girl nursery decor

Feminine baby girl nursery decor

This post contains affiliate links. Photo credits: Ashley Summers Photography

After sharing my daughter’s bedroom recently, I had a lot of feedback that my readers want to see more of my home – you ask, I deliver! I’m excited to share my nursery with you all.

How to start designing a room

If you feel overwhelmed and don’t know how to start decorating a room, here’s what you should do:

  1. Start a Pinterest board for inspiration. Narrow down your favorite aesthetic, considering colors, textures, and specific elements you want for the room.
  2. Choose one element to start with to build the room around. This could be an area rug, paint color, or piece of furniture.
  3. You can online shop so you can “see” all of your products together and shop at once or get pieces one-by-one as you find them in stores.

When designing the nursery, I already had the crib and knew I had to choose wallpaper for an accent wall to start – I’m kind of a wallpaper fanatic…and area rugs…and throw pillows.

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Girls bedroom tour

Girls’ bedroom tour

During my third pregnancy, my husband and I spent a lot of time switching most of the major rooms in our home to accommodate our growing family. Our family room moved to the basement, the master bedroom moved to the first floor to replace the family room, Ginny moved into our old room, and luckily the nursery stayed the same. Thank goodness for having three little girls so our nursery decor didn’t have to change because all of the other changes took quite a lot of planning and time.

While I’ll never consider any of our rooms finished, I’m excited to share the progress of our oldest daughter’s new room – her “big girl room” will eventually be shared with our middle daughter and has everything I love in a room: pink, area rugs, a variety of patterns, wallpaper, and some whimsical details.

This is a space that we all spend a lot of time in now, that I feel happy with, and will probably continue to update until it’s *just* right.

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