Introduction
Once Upon a Time… it was two days before Halloween this year and Josh was hard at work on his fabulous haunt experience. At some point during the day of setting up for our little family party the idea struck me that we needed a cozy faux fur rug for our Christmas decor. I can’t tell you why I had that thought. But I did and then I hit pinterest, first for rug stuff, then for all Christmas stuff. In my perusing I found out about “Christmas Home Tour”s. Established interior design bloggers get together and post their gorgeously decorated homes.  I looked through a good handful of them and it was really quite exhilarating! I wanted to have my own Christmas Home Tour!!!! And Josh was delightfully supportive, so here it is!

Disclaimer
Some things you ought to know about this little tour include: I am NOT a real interior designer. So if you happen to be familiar with these design blogs and/or are a designer yourself, don’t get your hopes too high.

Also, I am not a professional photographer (in case you haven’t noticed yet), nor am I very well acquainted with our photo editing software. Also, by the time I could take pictures it was already dark, so we only have our artificial lighting. Due to all these things, the pictures are not as spectacular as the ones from the real design blogs.

Another thing you should know, especially if you are a mother of young children, is that my house looked like this for approximately 20 minutes and those minutes came at the cost of an entire day of cleaning most of which my children spent watching movies or playing by themselves. So yeah.

Anyway, on with the tour!

Our front room is where the magic all starts! I decided the easiest way to go about decoration color schemes was to keep with the existing color scheme of each room I decorated. The front room is purple and gray, so the colors I chose were metallics and purple. I also wanted this room to be the more Christ centered one.

The highlight, as ever, of this room is the beautiful mantel (Josh made it for me, by the way 🙂 ). I made the star out of dowels which I spray-painted gold. Josh made the nativity for me! It turned out perfectly! And I made the Glory to the Newborn King sign. It is extremely reflective paint, though, so I might have to redo the letters one day.

I originally had the same stockings I made last year (tan instead of purple), but Josh said that the stockings kind of blended in with the white of the mantel. Plus there wasn’t any of the purple on the mantel and it sort of interrupted the flow of the room. I agreed and I am very pleased to have the purple ones. Fortunately, stockings don’t take too long to make. 🙂

The next room is the kitchen/dining room. I wanted the tablescape to be an extension of the metallic theme from the tree, though sans purple. I feel like the middle could have used a little something more fleshing out, but I had already exhausted my resources, and I was still quite content with it as it was.

Here is a close-up of the table setting itself.

The counter in the kitchen may be my favorite thing in there because it looks SO good and Josh did it all basically by himself! He was especially proud of his impractical and trendy use of twine around the peppermint tea! Also, we borrowed the gorgeous olive-wood nativity from my mom for a Relief Society activity and have yet to return it, so it is making a special appearance.

Then we move to the family room which, apparently, has the worst lighting in the house because I had to turn my iso up to 3200 for all the pictures, so they’re super grainy. Plus, no matter how I messed with the white-balance before the pictures were taken and no matter how I tinkered with it on the computer, everything looks super yellow. Oh well.

My goal with this room was stick with the existing blue and white and make it sort of winter-wonderland-esque. 

I feel like this might be a nice time to show what this room looked like a year ago. I wanted to do a great big before and after post about it, but I feel like I’ll never be all the way done with it. ha ha!

Here are some more details from the family room. The star of the show here has to be this sign. Josh made this happen for me! (He’s the best, if you hadn’t heard!) I told him what I wanted and found a font I liked, then he free-handed ALL OF IT! I guess he did use a bowl to get the circles perfect for the bells. But everything else was Josh’s magnificent artist hand.

We just got this sign little sign from the amazing Lacey at a party last weekend and it fit so perfectly with everything!

I made this pillow cover. I have painted so many pillows in the past year that I tried to take a shortcut. The pen I got is the reason for the nasty W. It just goes to show that you can’t always find good shortcuts.

This gorgeous nativity was a gift from my brother and sister-in-law from their trip to Curacao.

Then on the other side of the room we find:

The tree was a little more nicely decorated at multiple points during the past few weeks. But the kids have been such champs at leaving the big tree alone that I can’t be too upset at them for having fun with one tree.

And, just for fun, this is what this chair looked like when we bought it a year ago at DI for $20.

Feel free to be impressed with the fact that we reupholstered an armchair!

And so ends my own personal Christmas Home Tour! I do not exaggerate when I say I could NOT have done any of this without Josh’s love, support, and manpower. He really is the very best!