Christmas Decorating with Meaning: Part 2

 Welcome back to the second installment of my little holiday decor tour! In today's post, I'm focusing on the dining room. If you've followed my blog, the dining room decor will look similar to how I decorated this space last year. 

 

I feel like I'm a little bit limited in the dining room simply by the colors of the walls (olive) and the green and gold chair rail border. For that reason, I think the "woodland/metallic" theme works pretty well in the space. As long as I continue to like it, I'll keep the theme!

It's really hard to get a good picture of the dining room with the tree lit. This picture makes it look very gold, which it is not. But the gold ornaments and decorations do give a bit of a gold glow.

The top of the china cabinet is very much the same as last year, with a combination of things I've made myself (the nut tree and pinecone tree) and family heirlooms. I made those trees (and some hanging nut balls!) when I was 8 months pregnant with Bailey and working at Spouse's office. I remember hot gluing nuts and pine cones in between my "official" duties! This must have been my woodland "nesting" phase!

This footed compote is a real treasure. I keep it up on the china cabinet year-round, out of kitty jumping range! It belonged to my great great grandmother on my dad's side.

Here's a new addition to the dining room holiday decor -- this beautiful old footed bowl/compote which I found at a thrift store for less than $2. I quickly identified it on eBay as pressed glass known as sandwich glass and made by the Indiana Glass company in the early 1900s. I have some dark green sandwich glass dishes which belonged to my grandma (I'll be getting them out for Christmas!), which is why the bowl caught my eye. It looks so pretty filled with these old ornaments! Someone let go of a treasure when they donated this beautiful piece. I'm very glad I found it!

Under the dome are some wooden woodland critters I bought in Germany during college. The wooden box is filled with gold and silver pine cones my mom used at Christmas.

 I made this little guy last year by antiquing the car and strapping the tree to the roof. I haven't decided which size of wood base to use, so right now it's perched on two!

 These wooden trees came from a thrift store a couple of years ago. I love their simple shape and how easily they work into lots of different holiday themes.

The dining room tree holds all of my gold, silver, and bronze mercury glass ornaments, plus other ornaments in that same color scheme. Last year I sorted my mercury glass ornaments by color which made it much easier to find the colors I needed when I decorated the tree this year! One year I'm going to have to do a pink tree because I have a TON of pink mercury glass. Too bad I'm not a fan of pink! Hopefully it will grow on me because I'm not parting with those beautiful ornaments, regardless of the color!

 Thanks for following me around the house this year! I'll be back in the coming days with more holiday decorating photos. 

Happy holidays to everyone!
jp