2021 Holiday Tour of Homes-Amy’s Virginia Craftsman Home Decorated for the Holidays in Green, Gold and Cream

Welcome everyone to Day Three of the Holiday Tour of Homes. Yesterday Christy shared her beautiful apartment in Germany and today is my day to show off our holiday decor. Today’s theme is Living Rooms, which is where we always have what I consider to be our ‘main’ tree. For those of you coming over from Amanda at Sincerely Marie Designs, welcome! You can read more about the two of us and the history of our blog, 11 Magnolia Lane here. We’ve been at this for over ten years and have countless homes and decor styles in our archives, not to mention plenty of holiday decorating posts.

Each year we co-host this tour with Jenny from Evolution of Style, though she does most of the heavy lifting to organize our group, we are so appreciative of that! I will include all the links to the other tour participants at the end of the post so you can visit them all, there is always so much holiday decor inspiration on this tour.

I confess to being a big holiday decorator, it’s something that always brings me joy. I even have contributed photos of our holiday home to our local lifestyle magazine for the last several years, and typically I do multiple trees throughout our home. This year I have not quite risen to that same level as we traveled for Thanksgiving this year so I didn’t have as much time in November to decorate. Also, each year I seem to feel a different inclination towards how to decorate. Last year in the craziness of the pandemic I went very traditional with reds, greens and tartans (see that here) but this year I felt like I wanted something simpler and calmer. In this room I focused on earthy greens, sparkling gold and brass accents along with a creamy, neutral base. I feel like it’s soothing and festive at the same time.

In true blogger fashion, I was working on this decor up until the last minute, and will probably continue to tweak the tree and mantel for a few more weeks. My daughter is very proficient at making videos, so she helped me put together some video of our home this year who prefer that to photos, you can click below to see it.

This is our main living area, it’s right off our kitchen so one large tree is sufficient in here. We have a 9′ Prince Flocked from King of Christmas. It makes a statement but it is also a large, full tree so it takes a lot of decor. I used what I already had and only bought a few inexpensive green ornaments this year along with battery-operated candles, I like the vintage feel.

I waited to see whether I wanted to add ribbon to the tree this year, I typically add loops of ribbon to fill out our tree, but this year in keeping with a simpler feel I left it off this year. Instead I relied on some inexpensive beaded garlands (which I have been searching for more of) I looped across the branches. I mixed mercury glass ornaments with green glass balls, candles, tree picks and a few family treasures to complete the tree and so far I am not missing the ribbon.

I used garlands I already had on hand to decorate our mantel, our TV is hung over our fireplace which doesn’t leave much space to decorate. I just mixed some inexpensive garlands together with some greenery picks and wired it all together. The stockings came from HomeGoods over the years, I tied some green and white striped ribbon (a Lucketts market find) on for color.

Earlier this year I moved my antique corner cabinet to this room from our dining room, so this was the first year I decorated it in this space. I added tinsel trees to the top along with a velvet leaf garland and ribbon, also found at the Lucketts holiday market over the years.

I plan to add a fresh garland on our stairs but I have learned that one would likely not make it to Christmas if I put it up this far ahead. In the meantime I used a faux boxwood garland with some satin ribbon, I plan to run a second post (hopefully next week) with more photos of our kitchen and dining room and I’ll try to share some updated pictures of the stairs then.

The wrapping pa per from Rifle Paper Co. helped decide my decorating color scheme this year, I love their selection of pretty paper, and the green and gold was perfect.

I hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season. This year more than ever, having time with family, appreciating our blessings and focusing on the true gift of Christmas (Jesus) is more meaningful than ever. I wish you all the best and I thank you for taking the time to visit us again this year.