Holiday Decorating: Dining Room and Bedroom

This post was sponsored by Home Centric. All opinions are my own.

Christmas decorating is going on in full force around here! I used to be a diehard never-decorate-until-the-day-after-Thanksgiving person, but a few years ago I realized that it actually allows me to have a more peaceful and relaxed holiday season if I start earlier. As I’m sure you can all appreciate, while decorating for Christmas is fun for me, it’s also part of our business, and I don’t like leaving my “work” until the last minute. For the past three years, I’ve begun my decorating at the beginning of November and I’ll probably never go back!

Today we’ve partnered with the folks at Home Centric to get the dining room and my daughter’s room ready for the season. This was actually a perfect opportunity for me as our new Home Centric store has just opened and I was anxious to get in there and check it out (if you’d like to see if there’s one near you, check out their store locator here).

Home Centric didn’t disappoint; the selection is great and the prices are excellent. For instance, it’s always hard to find an inexpensive fiddle leaf fig, but these were only $39.99:

Of course they have a huge variety of seasonal items to choose from. This was definitely a situation where I should have brought the bigger car!

This rhinestone-embellished tree skirt jumped into my cart but then I decided to go in a different direction for my daughter’s room so I put it back. I wound up running back over to the store the next day to buy it for my upstairs tree, though. There’s a life lesson in there, I think.

Probably the purchase I was most excited about is this sweet rocking horse that is going to be the centerpiece of my Christmas table:

He was only $39.99 , believe it or not!

Once I decided that the rocking horse was going to be the star of the show, I shopped the store for some coordinating items. I added a gold runner with beaded snowflakes (bonus: it reverses to plain gold) and some greenery from the yard.

My vintage white and gold Limoges dishes are always perfect for the holidays. The jeweled snowflakes are also from Home Centric and I cleaned them out at our store! They’re the perfect plate topper, and you’ll see in just a minute that I also used them on my daughter’s tree.

The sparkling gold LED candles were just a few dollars apiece and now I don’t have to worry that I’ll catch my greenery on fire (I prefer not to disclose if that has happened in the past).

Their candle selection was impressive so I picked up a few balsam and fir-scented candles because they are my absolute favorite at this time of year. A candle is always a perfect gift for a hostess or a neighbor, and I like to keep a few in my gift closet just in case.

Those same jeweled snowflakes that look so pretty on my table are absolutely amazing on my daughter’s tree. She’s always had a tabletop tree but this year we went to a narrow 6′ flocked tree. She’s a dancer and after years and years and years of Nutcracker performances, she has so many ballet-themed ornaments that we ran out of space on her small tree.

In addition to all of the snowflake ornaments in the store, I also picked up a couple of boxes of round white and silver ornaments; the detail on them is beautiful.

This is what I decided to do under her tree instead of the rhinestone-studded tree skirt:

I wrapped one of her practice tutus around the base of the tree and then piled her dead pointe shoes on top of it. Apparently all of those old shoes are considered “friends” and we can never get rid of them. I’m sure in a few more years she’ll have enough that I can build an entire tree out of them!

The little silvery white trees are from Home Centric, too, and finish off the corner perfectly.

You may have noticed our rescue kitty, Brontë, who likes to sleep on the little French loveseat. If she could bother to open her eyes, she’d have a beautiful view!