Indoor Decorating Ideas for Christmas

Indoor Decorating Ideas for the Holiday Season

You can approach the holiday season with a sense of dread, or you can make it great fun. You can think about the 101 things to buy and do before Christmas, or you can focus on the joy and beauty all around. One easy way to help tip the scales is to decorate your home and office to match the festive season. When you arrive, the decorations are bound to give you a lift.

There are the traditional, and still great fun, decorations: popcorn strung on strings, ornaments hung on the tree and fireplace, a wreath on the door. Now go beyond the routine to create a space that matches the mood you'd like to create.

You may have a number of houseplants that are large enough to support decorations. They can be livened up with small Christmas tree bulb ornaments. Or you can make them delightfully different by shopping for something unusual. How about some miniature Snow White and the Seven Dwarf figurines to attach to that indoor bonsai? Or, maybe your taste runs more to Indy 500 cars. Get some tiny red and green racers and hang them from the indoor palm tree.

Any surface around the home presents a great opportunity to display books, photos, photocubes, small sculptures and many other objects that can bring to mind the holiday season. You could lay out some Christmas-themed books on the coffee table. Or, you might try building a short plastic mountain of photocubes filled with pictures from past Christmas seasons.

Glass jars and bowls provide the perfect chance to exercise your creativity. Fill them with objects traditionally associated with Christmas. Pine cones, walnuts and other natural items bring to mind snow covered hills and crackling fires in the hearth. Or, go for something more abstract that still shows the season's colors. Red and green marbles make a great base into which you can insert brown rods with yellow and red ovals attached.

If you have stairs or an indoor balcony the railing gives you still more room to work with. They look terrific covered with twisted ribbon in seasonal colors. Or you can just dot them sparsely with a red bow or two.

Naturally, you should consider how best to place those strings of miniature multi-colored lights. You can drip them off the railings like icicles or you can run them horizontally. But to really make the best use of lights, consider curving them into a design. It could be a personal logo or a word of holiday cheer spelled out.

Lights can be placed in other locations as well. Anyplace that two surfaces meet in a line makes for a good spot to run a string. The highest point of an angled ceiling makes a good spot to illuminate. Or, you can run them around the edge of a corner table for something a little different.

Add some Christmas-time plants here and there and your home or office will welcome you. A friendly space is a great mood elevator to remind you of all the good things about the season.