How to Turn Your Home into a Winter Wonderland this Season
Decorating for the holidays can be extremely fun and festive, but many of those decorations have to be taken down by the New Year, leaving space for seasonal decor. For decor that you can keep up all winter long, consider these winter decorating ideas.
Play Up Your Fireplace
The vignette of a wintery fireplace is a classic image, and you can easily play up your fireplace to make your home more seasonally appropriate. If you don’t have a fireplace in your home, there are tons of tutorials online to create a faux one. Although for Christmas you may have a lot of decorations that are holiday-specific, you can incorporate seasonally themed items so that once the holidays are over there is still a seasonal touch to your fireplace.
On your mantle, you can add in candles and garlands that fit the season and not just the holidays — for example, use a snowflake or star garlands in colors and materials that match your desired decor color and aesthetic. You can also use firewood as a decor piece next to your fireplace (even if your fireplace is fake, gas, or electric). Make sure to buy firewood locally since firewood sourced from too far away can carry pests and organisms that aren’t native to where you live.
For an extra cozy look, place a stack of books that match the color and aesthetic of the room on the fireplace mantle. For example, if you’re going for a white and green color scheme in your living room, you can include a stack of white books with an evergreen bough on top or a stack of green books with a vase of white flowers next to it.
Use Evergreen Branches
Evergreen trees are a classic piece of winter imagery, and using the boughs and branches in your decor can make your space feel very seasonal. You can use smaller boughs in vases and spread them around your home for a small touch that brings a wintery element to any space.
Incorporating evergreen boughs or branches into your centerpiece can easily make your table decor feel wintery. One idea is to lay a garland or branch across your dining table and add in candle stands throughout with seasonally appropriate candles and faux snowflakes scattered throughout it to make it feel like the outdoors have been brought inside.
Disguise Your Security System
Having security cameras and an alarm system is a good idea year-round considering the fact that 65% of the 2.5 million annual break-ins are home burglaries, but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily match your decor scheme. You can use seasonal decoration to disguise your security cameras and any other security system related eyesores that may be in your home.
For something like a keypad, consider putting a cute macrame wall hanging over it so that you can easily move it to the side if you need to access it. For cameras, you can hang a garland to help it blend into the room better, but make sure that you don’t cover any of the lense so that it has an uninterrupted view of the room.
Display Your Jewelry
If you have jewelry pieces that you love but rarely wear, using them as part of the decor is a great way to display them when they aren’t on your body. If you have a collection of silver jewelry, a material that has been used in jewelry making for 6,000 years, you can use hooks to display the collection together. To make the display more seasonal, you can put hooks on a natural wood branch to hang your jewelry from. For example, using a curly willow branch adds both a seasonal element and a fun twist to make your jewelry display feel like much more than a creative storage solution.
Winter Fragrances
Scent and memory are extremely connected, so putting winter scents into your home can really indicate to your brain what the season is. There are many ways to get winter scents into the rooms of your home, such as candles, potpourri, essential oil diffusers, wax melts, and reed diffusers. If you’re uncomfortable with having an open flame in your home, there are still ways to indulge in the comfort of winter scents.
When you’re looking for winter scents, stick to things that are warm, cozy, and inviting to really round out your space. Scents like pine, cedar, cinnamon, clove, and mint are often associated with winter, so look for those notes on the label of any scented products you’re looking at.
Use Rich Fabrics
There is nothing more wintery than cuddling up under a warm, cozy blanket. Winter textures are heavier, softer, and more luxurious than summer textures, which are meant to be lighter and provide less warmth. Adding in throw pillows, throw blankets, and rugs in winter patterns and materials can make your home feel much more seasonal. Look for velvet, corduroy, flannel, and faux fur when it comes to adding these little touches to your living spaces. You can also layer multiple textures in a similar color scheme to really add to the coziness of the space.
Think About Summer
Although summer may seem far away when you are trudging through daily snowstorms, think about the future of your space while you invest in your winter decor. For example, if you decide to add in or take out furniture, think about how that will impact your air conditioning unit’s ability to cool your space. AC units need a certain amount of power and energy to cool your home, about 20 BTU per square foot, so if you take out a considerable amount of furniture, be sure to consult an HVAC professional to check that your system will be able to withstand the upcoming heat.
Adding a touch of winter to your home can counteract the cold and bitterness of the season and keep you and your family warm and happy when the sunlight hours are short and we’re spending most of our time indoors.
What do you add to your home for the winter? Did you try any of these ideas? Let us know in the comments!
