Decorating for Christmas is a guaranteed way to give your home a festive feel! But a challenge we all face is adding cozy Christmas decor to our homes without causing a clutter pileup. Our post today will cover seven ways you can cozy up your home for the holidays in 10 minutes or less.
Listen below for the entire episode on The Systemize Your Life Podcast
Cozy Christmas Decor
With the holidays being here, we’ve talked a lot on the blog and podcast about creating more time. We have covered how to have hassle-free holidays by sticking to the important rhythms in our life. But today, we are talking about something a bit more lighthearted and fun.
Every now and then I love sprinkling in this piece of me that brings me so much joy: decorating and making a house a home. The coming and going of seasons brings with it different holidays. Making your house feel and smell great for the holidays serves as a fantastic pick-me-up.
Today’s blog covers seven quick, inexpensive ideas for how you can cozy up your home for the holidays. Take one or take them all, but these cozy Christmas decor ideas will spruce up your space in a hassle-free and clutter-free way. If you’re feeling festive, let’s dive in!
1. Front Door Wreath or Trees
The first cozy Christmas decor hack is to pick up a fresh wreath from Trader Joe’s or Costco and hang it on your door. It is so simple but so stunning.
Another front door decor idea is to grab a 3-4 of the small, potted Christmas trees and cluster them around your front door.
If you can, grab trees of differing heights to create a layered effect. Otherwise, you can prop some of them up on a platform behind the others to create a nice layered look. The potted, mini trees are nice since you can keep them around for awhile and they function in a more multipurpose way.
2. Candles with Greenery
I love combining battery-operated candles of differing heights into a cluster and binding them together with twine or ribbon. You could leave the cluster of candles like that or you could place them in the center of a wreath-like collection of greenery. Strands of eucalyptus, juniper, or pine work really well. You can spritz them with water daily to keep them fresh,
If you live in a dry climate like I do in Arizona or prefer an even lower-maintenance decor, they do have artificial greenery at Hobby Lobby that you can get and reuse.
The beauty of battery-operated candles is that they are not a fire hazard and they do not release toxic chemicals that many candles do. I generally shy away from all candles, even ones that are considered super clean, just because you have to be very careful about what is in the wax and the wicks.
One final thing I would like to add to this particular cozy Christmas decor idea is that of incorporating a diffuser. I love to either use the diffuser with the candles in the middle of a wreath or sometimes without candles. Then I experiment with all kinds of Christmasy scents.
If you want to find out more about essential oils in general, you can check out my guide on essential oils. I don’t currently have any resources on oils for Christmas specifically, but I love talking about that, so feel free to send me a DM on Instagram and I would be happy to message with you about it there!
3. Tiny Ceramic Christmas Town
Oh, this cozy Christmas decor tip is my fave! I look forward to this every year. If you have a sofa table or credenza or any sort of open, centralized spot in your house, you can put a tiny ceramic Christmas town there.
These little decorations are everywhere. You create a little village using tiny, white, ceramic houses and they are just so fun for me and my girls. They sell these little houses in the Target dollar section.
You can even use the little bottle-brush trees with the houses or just create a mini bottle-brush tree forest. Either option is very minimal and visually appealing.
To make it even more cozy, place a battery-operated tea candle inside of the ones with windows. My girls love putting it together and it is so easy to create and clean up. I store them in a bag in our Christmas tote and when I get our Christmas decor down, I pull the bag out and have it up in minutes.
“Making your house feel and smell great for the holidays serves as a fantastic pick-me-up.”
4. Styled Christmas Tray
If you have a little creative bone in your body or want to try being creative, this is for you. Typing out “Christmas styled tray” in Pinterest will bring up images to help you try this idea. Basically, a styled Christmas tray is a round tray with handles on the sides that you fill with decorations.
Maybe a vase with some fake or real pine scraps or some little ceramic white houses. You can incorporate bottle-brush trees, a battery-operated candle, or a diffuser. Perhaps you use a little glass jar with peppermint candies or gingerbread cookies. You combine things that really spark that Christmas spirit in you that will blend well in a contained area together.
For pine scraps, you can ask your local Home Depot or Lowe’s or another store that is cutting Christmas trees for their scraps. We do that every year and use them in multiple of these decor ideas.
Create that styled basket or tray. Then you can set it on your kitchen island or your coffee table or credenza. That’s all that you have to do to decorate for Christmas, you guys! You can even create a couple and place them in the really open spaces of your home to add festivity. I definitely recommend you try this idea for cozy Christmas decor in your home.
5. Cluster of Hanging Stockings
Probably the easiest of all these ideas for cozy Christmas decor is to use a cluster of stockings. No, not the ones that are stuffed full of goodies on Christmas day and are fourteen different colors. I’m talking about the bigger, statement stockings. Maybe your family’s Christmas stockings are the gorgeous, intentionally designed stockings. That’s great, use those!
Nothing elaborate is necessary when looking for statement stockings. You could layer some short stockings on top of a really long one to one side of your mantle. Or you use several stockings of the same color with different textures spread evenly across the bottom of your mantle.
If you opt for different color stockings, having consistency in the textures on all of them is a really nice touch. Try typing “cluster of hanging stockings” into your Pinterest search bar to get a better idea of what I’m talking about. Grab some inspiration there and run with it!
6. Throw Pillows and Blankets
You know that I can’t get through this episode without mentioning throw pillows and blankets! They are the epitome of cozy Christmas decor. When we opened up our Christmas totes, out came the Christmas pillows, Christmas blankets, and Christmas stuffed animals. Within minutes of doing that, our entire family ended up cuddling on the couch.
You are going to be so surprised at how much having festive pillows on your couch will bring a smile to your face. There is just something about walking through the door and seeing the holidays there in your living room, on your couch, that is so heartwarming. Try it!
7. Table Runner
Unbelievably simple and fresh, table or island runners add that “je ne sais quoi” to any place during the holidays. In my previous job and life, as a florist, I made countless eucalyptus swags or runners or garlands.
You don’t have to make these by hand. If you are entertaining or hosting, you can order these fresh off of the internet very inexpensively. You can also buy the fake ones at Hobby Lobby. I doubt that you’ll want to spend hours sitting and putting one of these together, but if you do, here are my recommendations.
What I love to do is mix some eucalyptus in with some pine. There is a lovely, stark contrast between the silvery blue-green of the eucalyptus and the strong dark green of the pine. A garland like this really is a statement piece.
There’s one more addition you can add to really hone that holiday flair. Take some festive ribbon and tie a couple of decorative bows amidst the garland. It is so cute and so fun! The last thing you’ll need to do if you used live plants is to mist them with water every day to keep them fresh longer.
BONUS Idea: Mistletoe!
Surprise! Here is my final BONUS idea for cozy Christmas decor. I feel that so many people forget about this one and we love it. If you don’t do anything but this, I implore you to hang mistletoe!
I am not sure when it started, but my family growing up always did mistletoe and it is something that we do in my family now. Most years you can get fresh mistletoe at Trader Joe’s and local markets. It is definitely cheaper to get the fake stuff from Hobby Lobby or somewhere, but we love to get ours fresh.
We also would purchase something called kissing balls growing up. Kissing balls are round bunches of greenery made out of pine and maybe some other stuff. You hang the kissing balls with the mistletoe tied underneath them in every place possible around the house. My girls think they’re adorable and I love cornering my husband underneath them every chance I get.
Deck Those Halls!
May these ideas help you get an extra bit of easy coziness in your Christmas decor this holiday season without the clutter or hassle. I would love to see when you guys implement any of these ideas, so please share them in our Facebook group! As always, I cannot wait to see you next time on the blog!
Frequently Asked Questions
I'd love to add some holiday decor to my house, but I feel overwhelmed with clutter right now. Any ideas on how to start with decluttering?
Ahhh yes! This time of year is the perfect time of year to start decluttering. You can check out my podcast vault and use the Command/Control + C function to search the term “declutter.” That will show you the many podcast episodes that I’ve done on getting clutter under control!
