A Homespun Christmas Mantel

Especially since COVID, I’ve spent a lot of time considering what sorts of holidays memories I want my boys to be able to share with their future families.

I want my boys’ memories to involve daily advent readings around our kitchen table each night after dinner. Evenings snuggled up in our pajamas on the couch watching a Christmas movie with a mug of hot chocolate. Afternoons gathered around our little kitchen island doing some Christmas cookie baking and decorating or making attempts at creating our own decorations.

I kept coming back to the phrase “joyful simplicity.” And an unintentional theme was born: A homespun Christmas. My first crack at it was on our mantel.

Our mantel is always the first place that I decorate during the holidays. Just as the hearth functioned as the heart of the home, once upon a time, this same location seems to always be at the heart of my creative pursuits.

I believe we all have the ability to bring beauty out of the simple and ordinary. My mission with our mantel was to reuse what I could, create from what was already on-hand, and spend no additional money.

I’m proud to report that the only mantel expense was an unplanned $5 bag of cranberry wooden bead strands that were also used on the tree.

I borrowed quite a few low-hanging branches from a cedar tree in our front yard to create the garland and wreath. The sweet deer were reused from mantels from years past. And the galvanized milk box will live its next life as our fireplace wood holder.

I read this beautiful line from Heaven and Nature Sing by Hannah Anderson: “The paradox of the sacred and the mundane sits at the heart of the Christmas story.” Not only is it a profound way of looking at the larger Christmas story, it feels more important than ever to look at our little cottage through this same lens this Christmas season.