From house to house, as the temperature gets colder and colder and December descends, homes dress up for the holidays – lights and cookies and carols galore. It’s tempting to dive right in. But before you turn your own home for the holidays, do so the right way. You don’t want to miss a thing from jump street. We’re here to be your wingman, your elf, and save you from holiday home decor disasters.
We’re starting with two focal points of your home, your fitted bedroom and your fitted wardrobes – both often sadly overlooked but can become two of the most magical areas of your home to get you through Christmas. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s banish the decorating blues and celebrate this most magical of seasons together as we transform every space from the smallest to your biggest rooms as we make the house a home filled with a warm, loving, festive feeling this Christmas and beyond. In this festive guide, I show you how to get creative with hints and tips for every area of your home – from fairy lights draped across your bedroom bed frame to floor-to-ceiling fitted wardrobes and Christmas opulence. Here we go!
Creating a Festive Atmosphere with Creative Decorations
Almost nothing is more festive-looking (and more free) than infusing a home with a little Hygge seasonality – and recycling last year’s decorations in a new imaginative way. Turn your fitted bedroom to better use than it has been: it can become your seasonal bolt-hole as much as its fitted wardrobes, fitted closets, fitted drawers and the rest can become imaginary Neverland and storage royalty. A new seasonal bedspread, for starters. Dressing your fitted storage with fairy lights and wreaths, for starters.
Besides which, no Christmas cliches – decorate from what you like, without the absolute ‘yes, please’ wholeheartedness, the search for some identifiable ‘Christmassyness’, that shot of back-of-the-retina joy from some gold or white or sparkly or starry that you inject yourself. If you’re a minimalist, or perhaps a Scandi, even your serious working adult clothes (at which I, a Brit, am still howling) can creep in: perhaps they morph into a muted white, wintery version of your own, with metallic accents.
Or the rest of the awesome accoutrements: Candles – warm glow, get you through a night of boring Netflix Christmas movies; throw pillows – old-fashioned comfort, some extra texture, not to mention a few extra pops of urgent colour to distract from the fact that yes, your cherished spare room is merely a spare bedroom; and antique baubles – the staid tradition and forced nostalgia your much-cherished spare room, by bylaw, has to be one tiny bit more festive than the place you actually live in.
Prepping Your Kitchen for Holiday Cooking and Baking
But when Christmas comes along, it’s all about you and your fitted kitchen and how you might maximise the potential of your fitted kitchen and change it into the most productive workspace by cooking, baking and preparing lots of food that will be consumed by lots of hungry people.’ Maria, aged 41, the wife of a surgeon at the University Medical School, Polish, English-speaking, and her Polish surprise spills into her English: But when Christmas comes along, it’s all about you and your fitted kitchen and how you might maximise the potential of your fitted kitchen and change it into the most productive workspace by cooking, baking and preparing lots of food that will be consumed by lots of hungry people.
Second, decant and spring-clean — every shelf in any kitchen should be hooped as hooped as hoop is he that when faking speaks the fake. And third and last, fake it as a holiday larder slurping spice, tin, bake, condiment, with all manner of special this-and-thats that requires your every space-saving, more-in hunch. All every nook and cranny of your fittled-up extern should hum as stored imagery to the votes of the mind’s-eye decorator. When decorating the Norfolk kitchen at our house, down went a banquette bench inset in which we slid: yup, tad, tad, you’ve guessed it, decanting stuff.
Glance back, and see what types of annoyance keep breaking into holiday feast prep and call out, and work around, in time for this year’s meal. Simply shell out for the pricey professional-grade appliances or tools – hey, magic in December – but the point is to build yourself a custom workbench from which you can work precisely and devotedly to whatever particular recipe you might be following, and do so joyfully.
Your redesigned kitchens aren’t only going to help you with your Christmas cookery – they will epitomise the convivial spirit of December hospitality at the turning of the dark year!
Organizing and Cleaning Tips for a Spick-and-Span Christmas Home
Next, on to the hub of the home – the fitted kitchen. A soft target for a ‘quick and dirty’ clean-up this Christmas – instead – polish your range and wipe down your worktops ferociously. Dust all of your pots and pans, clear out all the superfluous gadgetry, polish your cabinets, clear up Christmas and have the kitchen ready for cooking your celebratory meal ahead of time. Remove those old recipe papers and clear the decks with simple-to-manage files or electronic apps.
The glazed fitted kitchen has a lovely flow, so I suggest you always have your utensils within easy reach of the worktop; dust the appliances; ensure your cupboard interiors ooze slick tidiness. Feel free to play around with your kitchen storage; especially try wall-racks for your pans, and hang your coffee mugs from hooks that sit below the shelves. Have a good Christmas (but don’t overdo it!… Hiccup.) Bask in your glazed fitted kitchen.
But do not despair – drawners will not need to be rummaged through in your tinkling tiaranese castle: everything has to be re-visioned, so scrub carpets with floral focaccia spew or drape the drapes with some jangle that jangles so that all the world knows you’re doing a holiday clean, a ‘go all-in-get-your-“many-happy-returns” holiday home tarted up for some terminal something-special because it all says something about the state of your hemorrhoids of eager expectation for when the friends/family drop by for a tinnitus-tremblingly deep-cleaned heavenly holiday!
Making Your Home Cozy: Lighting and Fragrance Tips for Christmas
Next, sprinkle a little magic at the top, with your lighting control: and fitted bedrooms, within fitted wardrobes, can be a source of fairy magic too. Twinkling Christmas tree lights are a given, but it doesn’t matter how you rig them — set with a timer and let it flicker, on and off, in a gentle ebb and flow of gently romantic light, as it bleeds through gauze curtains — that’s the type of haze you’re after, bathing your rooms and blazing out a seasonal hug. This visual nostalgia is completed by hand-waxed candles casually dotted around the rooms — not too forceful but on the other hand never too tasteful.
And perhaps the most forgotten of all in theming up a room – scents. Your fitted bedroom, lit in amber ambient lighting, with frankincense and winter woods perfusing the air, is a very different experience than the same fitted bedroom, daubed in whites of fairylights, with sweet cinnamon cookies baking in the oven and the scent of baked goods drifting through as they brown. Scents are one of the most powerful ways we can actively hack ourselves into states or memories associated with those scents. What better time to hack this system than at Christmas, when our homes are all being prepped for the merriment? Think of each room as its own olfactory story, so have some fun with this layer of flavour.
Eco-Friendly Tips for a Sustainable Christmas at Home
Oh, yes, such garnished firs, tinselled trees, and draped holiday lights dripping from fitted wardrobes (oh, how jolly, with blinkers!) and singing these trite seasonal platitudes of seasons greetings and yadda yadda yadda — but all that garnish gets swirled in with a seasonal shot of consumerism that is, to put it mildly, highly out of keys if you are trying to keep your carbon footprints low. Trimming this Christmas in intentionally ‘green’ decor takes on a doubly seasonal win — can you guess what that is? More meaning, less waste.
What about repurposes for the fitted bedrooms: make your own cotton stockings from pure organic cotton or old-school linen bed covers. Non-wardrobe drawers in the newly undressed home could be made into quirky advent calendars, filled with locally and fairly traded chocolate wrappers. Wrap nothing (we could save a huge amount of waste with these wrapping paper mountains every year) but wrap everything in reusable fabric wrappings that could be made from old repurposed scarves. Everything at home will look green-fantastic overnight.
Layer on some energy-saving, and turn off the fairy lights on built-in wardrobes, or the LEDs in your house! Swathe yourself in a green-feel duvet this Christmas – that little bit extra really does add up.
Setting Up the Perfect Christmas Tree: From Choosing to Decorating
Nothing gets rid of all this psycho-emotional dirt that has been trodden in from the fitted bedroom like a massive Christmas tree, which transforms that snug living space into a cozy Christmas corner. Nothing like waking up in the morning shimmering from the fire of twinkle lights and baubles on the trees.Bright baubles and fluffy pines covered with light bulbs are good but have you ever noticed the size? The inhabitants of a fitted bedroom are required to pay close attention especially to the skinniness of a Christmas tree – it is quite lean in comparison with a standard one, but at the same time is equally beautiful and prepares the ground for ideas of decorating.
Glittery glimpses that create the pattern, a shot of instant decoration, a flourish of flash and filigree, just where they’re needed – they add a lot for very little effort. When working a decorative theme in sparkle, stay with the colour scheme across the fitted wardrobe or bedroom scheme, another colour maybe that links up with other colours elsewhere in the room? Your tree should also be a portrait of you; so don’t hold back, a personal detail, yet something personal, could be your children’s (or your grandchildren’s), much-loved home-made decorations, or bits you’ve picked up on your travels; even old family heirlooms. That’s your tree!
