RE-decorating: Christmas Home Tour

FRONT DOOR:  The asymmetrical original front door to Reba's Monterey style Colonial home with a red Christmas wreath and a garland decorated with red ribbon and ornaments. Several years ago, Reba and her husband bought and renovated his grandmother's home, a designated historic house.  All Reba's Christmas decor is traditional in accordance with the home's style.

FULL VIEW FRONT DOOR ON PORCH:  Reba kept all the original hardware to the front door and kept the original white and green color scheme her husband's grandmother maintained for the exterior.  The wood front door is painted a dark green and her porch floor has terracotta tiles. She has wrapped her front planters with red ribbon and filled them with poinsettias.  Poinsettias are very popular during the holidays where our family is from  in South Texas.  You may have noticed our sister, Elsa,  has poinsettias in front of her fireplace in our blog entry on her Christmas decor.  Poinsettias are Mexican plants also known as "Noche Buena",  Christmas Eve in Spanish.  They are as Christmas-y as Santa in our area.  Both of my sisters chose to use red ones this year. I usually use the newer white ones for my own house  in Austin.

RAILING ON BACK PATIO: Reba likes to wrap her outdoor railings in garland and red bows for the holidays. Very simple and traditional. Those are palm trees and other tropical plants beside the steps off the back patio. The funny part of Christmas in South Texas is that it can sometimes be warm enough for shorts on Christmas day.

LIVING ROOM: Another traditional Christmas look.  Reba's Christmas tree in her living room has a deep red color velvet skirt with gold trim. The tree is decorated with red and gold ribbon and her collection of glass angel ornaments.   She places her tree in the corner of her living room in front of a display of Santos.   She moves some of her Santos to her mantel and pulls her husband's collection of small bronze dog sculptures off the mantel for the holidays.

A close up of one of Reba's glass angel ornaments. 

FAMILY ROOM: Reba's family room Christmas tree is monochromatic gold with gold ribbon and gold angel ornaments. It has a regal color theme with a deep purple velvet skirt with gold embroidery and gold trim.

Close up of Reba's gold ornaments on her family room tree.

LIBRARY: For the holidays, Reba drapes garland around her paintings.  She has added a folk Nativity set to the table top display of religious art pieces she normally has.

A close up shot of one of Reba's folk art angels. As I mentioned in the entry on my own Christmas mantel, collecting religious art pieces is very convenient during holidays because they can be easily incorporated into holiday decor.  This is especially true during Christmas and Valentine's Day.  Just use a little metallic or velvet ribbon and greenery around them, add a candle and they quickly make a dramatic and romantic setting.  LOVE them so much.

She has a white, crystal and silver tree she adds to the mix sometimes, too, but generally Reba repeats her Christmas decor year after year.  Yeah, she doesn't get to join in on the trends much, but sticking to traditional looks is easier on one's schedule and like so many, Reba is especially busy during December. Our mother is not exactly domestic, (an understatement), and my parents are now older, so Reba has to not only set up her house for Christmas, she usually has to help set up our mother's house as well which usually entails plenty of errands. Neither of my parents like to shop either so Reba usually gets stuck doing their holiday shopping for them and our father's birthday and our parent's anniversary are both in December.

A place setting from our father's birthday party last week.  Metallic red chargers from WalMart & Spode Christmas china sit on top of a matching Spode tablecloth.  We use matching Spode stemmed glasses. This is our family Christmas ware. Sometimes, Reba uses red glass goblets with it at her house, but for the family, we keep it what my dad likes to teasingly call "matchy- matchy."  For the party, Reba put out Christmas crackers and set out small red boxes filled with chocolates tagged with holiday gift cards inscribed with guests names to be place cards.

The handsome man with the glasses and the guayabera shirt is our father. He turned 81.  Our niece and nephews are on his right and our sister, Elsa, is on his left.  (Daddy's girl deluxe.)  The enormous chocolate birthday cake came from a local bakery. So SO good.  December is brutal on diets, every single year.  

Reba promised to send more pictures later, but that's it for now.  Doing this blog has made me realize that our style while traditional, is still greatly influenced by our region.  Hope you enjoy seeing this South Texas spin on traditional American Christmas decor.  If you did, we would love a comment or two. We are new bloggers and we've just gotten our first comments this week and each one has been very exciting and encouraging to us.  Thanks for visiting, y'all.

Written by Eldarose

P.S. I am having trouble posting replies to the comments, but I will change computers tonight to post some. THANK YOU for your  encouraging feedback. All the comments are very special to us especially since we are so new at blogging.