Collected & Cozy

Tag: Christmas Decor

  • Our Christmas 2025 Decorating Tour: The Joys(and laughs) of Decorating

    Usually I’m bursting with excitement to decorate for Christmas. I remember one year I made Jake decorate Halloween night because we didn’t get any trick or treaters. This year though? I’m not really feeling the Christmas spirit.

    I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I want to deep clean the whole house before the Christmas clutter? Maybe it’s because last year my toddler kept taking the ornaments off the tree and throwing them? Whether the cluttered house or toddler tantrums, I just wasn’t in the mood to decorate this year.

    Well, I finally mustered up the energy to decorate, and I’m glad I did. I compromised with myself. I didn’t decorate as much as I usually do, but I did just enough to have the Christmas spirit. Here is our 2025 Christmas Home Tour!

    Outdoor

    The beginning of our 2025 Christmas Decorating Journey started on an uncharacteristically warm November day. We woke up and the high was mid-60s. Jake got home from a morning workout and was bustling to hang the lights outside. I, being the Scrooge I was this year, came up with every excuse possible not to hang those lights. I literally decluttered our 2 spare bedrooms just to procrastinate.

    Our very advanced method of hot gluing lights to our bricks.

    Finally, around 3pm, we went outside to start on the lights. But wait? Did I immediately help hang them? Absolutely not. I found the time to clean up our back patio and put away all the cushions and toys in the garage…

    After that unnecessary task, I finally started helping with the lights. About an hour later, Jake was running the extension cord for our outdoor wreath that connects to the first strand of lights…and realized we strung the lights backwards. The male end was where the female end should be…

    After taking down every strand except 2, we lost all motivation and just stopped. We looked like the Beverly HIllbillies for exactly a week. The very next Saturday, Jake hung the rest of lights and our wreath above the garage. We opted out of wrapping our columns this year, but I’m loving the colors.

    Still haven’t plugged in the candy cane lights…

    Indoor

    After seeing Jake was hanging the lights during nap time, I decided to start on the indoor decorations, especially because he was getting in the attic for the outdoor wreath so might as well hang up and put out the decorations that lived up there.

    This is my favorite decoration this year. The cabinets look like presents, and it was super quick and easy to do.

    The first thing I did was try something new! My mom decorated her kitchen cabinets with ribbon this year, and I absolutely loved it so she gave me her leftover ribbon and I did it to ours! I think it looks so cute, and Jake has told me 3 different times that they look really good. It was a great start to the decorating process.

    After the cabinets, I had the motivation to hang our indoor wreath, set up our nutcracker and skinny tree, and our wooden nativity scene. By this time, the boys woke up, Jake was done outside, and we needed to get some fresh air so to the park we went!

    The next day I finished everything else. I didn’t decorate nearly as much this year. I know it’s because I don’t feel like fighting the boys on playing with the decorations.

    Here’s a photo dump of our indoor decorations, including our half decorated tree because my toddler was literally throwing ornaments as we were decorating and my baby was grabbing every ornament he could reach.

    It’s nice and cozy in our house, so I’m glad I finally decorated. There’s nothing like curling up on the couch with the fireplace and Christmas lights on.

    What’s your favorite part of the holiday season?

    Mine is always the lights.

  • Holiday Decoration Storage

    Holiday Decoration Storage

    By the end of the Christmas season, I am ready to just throw all the decorations in bins and leave it as a problem for future me. I haven’t gotten any of the decorations out yet so I figured it might be fun to see just how inconsiderate past me was to future me.

    There was a time when I wrapped all of our Christmas lights around coat hangers so they wouldn’t tangle. There was a time I had just 1 bin of decorations so I knew everything was together.

    It’s been years since then. I’ve accumulated a ton of decorations, whether through buying them myself or getting them second hand from my mother in law. So the organization isn’t great, but it’s working…enough.

    Here’s how we stored our decorations from the 2024 Holiday season!

    Outdoor Decorations

    We have a bin for all of our outdoor lights which just had everything thrown in Willy-Nilly. We have these gorgeous vintage looking multi colored bulb lights that luckily aren’t terrible to untangle. We also have smaller white stranded lights for our white columns and some pretty sad looking garland that I replaced the white lights with last year because the white stranded lights aren’t quite the right colors.

    Look at this chaos…

    We also have our cute candy cane path lights, and we always replace our garage lights for the season. The bulbs change from white, to green, to red.


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    Indoor Decorations

    The indoor decorations are where I’ve lost my marbles.

    I have them organized by tree, kinda. We have a taller 8.5ft tree for downstairs that my mother in law traded us for one of our 7.5ft trees. (shout out to her!) So I keep most of the ornaments and lights in a bin along with the tree skirt and angel. I have a bag that goes with the tree that has the wooden beads, ribbon, and some extra ornaments.

    You can see the shelf these usually live right behind it. Off to the side. Out of sight. Out of mind.

    The next bin is for our other tree. This one has a Grinch theme so it has all the ornaments, ribbon, and tree skirt as well.

    I have a little bin full of more sentimental ornaments from my and Jake’s childhood.

    Then we have a random assortment of stuff in our attic (which we were told was not meant for storage but come on. What’s an attic for if not for seasonal storage??)

    Up there we have our 3ft nutcracker, our 7.5ft tree, a nativity sign, and some other random things that we ran out of space for in the bins.

    It’s not pretty. It’s not aesthetic. It’s random bins we bought when we first moved into our house…but it works! Everything is here and we survived getting it all back out.


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