Christmas decoration

Over the past eighteen years, I have developed some of my own traditions for Christmas decorations in this house.  I love using candles around the house and there are always some in front of this mirror in the study but at Christmas I like to use gold ones if I can.  I tend to buy things like that when they are reduced to half-price in January.  Another of those many times when I feel sorry for people who don't have much space at home so they can't store much stuff.  I am very lucky that way; I can always take advantage of half price or BOGOF offers, even for ridiculous quantities of things.  So here are the gold candles that I probably bought last January!

I trail ivy, harvested from the garden, round the top and sides of the mirror and always buy a little holly with berries to decorate the top of the mirror and other bits and pieces round the house.  The gold baubles and red ribbons stay tied up in their bunches in a box and are ready to hook round the ivy and there's my Christmas decoration for this room.

This year I added one extra thing.  Normally there is a wind chime near the door and you can see that I have replaced it temporarily.

One year I held my Open Weekend at a time when I had already put up the decorations and someone wrote a lovely poem about the feeling of coming into the house and this room in particular.  I always do mulled wine for the Open Weekend and I think the smell of it added to the atmosphere.  At any rate, I was very pleased to know that I had created the ambience I had set out to create!

This year I haven't done as much decoration as usual.  There's still time, and I haven't ruled it out completely, but I haven't yet decorated the stairs in the way I normally do, with trails of ivy, bunches of holly, fir and juniper, red ribbons and strings of metallic red 'pearls'.  I often decorate the dining table in the same way, with bunches of greenery and red ribbons at each corner of a white cut-work cloth over a red one.  I haven't done that either, yet, since we will be having Christmas dinner elsewhere this year and I haven't decided whether to do the same thing for our New Year's Eve meal.