If you’re looking for English Cottage Christmas decor, you’re in the right place! I’m excited to share a mini tour of our family’s Fireside Room and the thoughts behind the design!

We recently got snow here in Washington state, and that always seems to kick our Christmas spirit into high gear! I popped on my fuzziest sweater, and got to work decorating our fireside room which is the space that’s truly the center of our home.

I’ve shared recently about how this space is a high-traffic area (a “glorified hallway”) with 3 different entrances in a relatively small space. This gives a unique set of decorating challenges, but being that it’s also central to so much of what happens in our home, it’s one of my favorite places to decorate for Christmas – everyone gets a taste as they’re going about their days!

*This post contains affiliate links to products I know &/or love.

How Many Christmas Trees is Too Many Christmas Trees?

If you’re searching the internet for someone to say that one tree is enough for an entire house’s Christmas decorations… you might not have ended up at the right place!

My philosophy is that everyone should have their own forest of trees!

I’m bringing that vision slowly to life by purchasing about 1 new faux tree each year and finding a new place to set it up within our home. I believe this year I’m up to seven!

Christmas Collaboration | 2022

This year for Christmas I decided to collaborate with some fellow talented designers to each showcase some of our Christmas decor.

My friend Andrea from Pine & Prospect blog shared her Cottage Style Christmas Tour on her blog & on YouTube.

Sarah from Grace in my Space shared her Simple & Natural Christmas Decor ideas on YouTube.

And Cami from Tidbits & Company shared her Handmade Christmas Home Living Room Tour on her Blog & on YouTube.

Knowing these ladies, and knowing my wonderful She Holds Dearly community – I know you’ll find something to love from each of these inspiring Christmas displays! Let them know I sent you over!

Choosing Decor Items for an English Cottage Christmas

And now for the main event! When I start decorating for Christmas each year, my first course of action is always to pull items from my NINE Christmas bins.

I share all about how I organize my seasonal decor HERE. Having a system with an updated spreadsheet makes this task a breeze! This time I created “shopping lists” for myself based on the areas I was planning to decorate and noted which boxes had the items I needed to accomplish the look I had planned in my head.

I felt QUITE smug as I headed out to the garage with a firm plan of attack – and it truly made the process so simple and smooth. I highly recommend it!

The process of Decorating an English Cottage Christmas

The first area I decorated was our stove area.

We use this stove as our main source of heat for our entire house, so making sure that my design for the area doesn’t override function is especially important.

As part of the function of the stove, keeping the kindling close at hand is always an important task. That’s solved by this large vintage crock I found while thrifting.

I layered a second, more ornate golden frame and this beautiful winter art from Etsy on top of the picture that I usually have hanging on our brick accent wall at my Daughter’s suggestion – she wanted to make sure everyone knew it was her great idea! We especially loved how well the colors matched with the crock. I’ve shared it before, but repetition, and especially in diagonal lines across different planes is a great way to pull a design together.

Underneath the picture I set my vintage wooden sled that I bought from Craiglist years ago for $50. I love the idea that it feels like it was placed there to dry out from being used outside in the snow.

I’ve found that being able to add imaginary or historical backstory to designs really helps make the look feel charming and vintage.

We had used bunches of salal to do some decorating at our church, and once it was finished being used there, I was able to take the dried bunches and created a swagged garland down the stair railing. I used red velvet ribbon to accent the points where it met the wooden railing.

Lastly, we hung our cream knit stockings along the pegs beneath the railings. Seeing as we have no mantle in the main area of the house (just one in our master bedroom), this has been a great solution for placing our stockings in years past.

Next I went to work re-styling the bookshelf between the fireside room & the kitchen.

I removed all of the brown & blues I had used during Fall – and stored them away in the Christmas bins I had been emptying (from my organizational system).

I’ve found that simply loading them up for the time being, and then spending the time at the end of the season to re-organize and re-inventory as necessary is a good compromise.

I pulled some of my great stash of red and green books, some red and white transferware, this neat vintage Santa figurine and some bottle brush trees to finish off the look.

I always like to add a little festivity to this corner of the kitchen as well.

I hung my DIY gingerbread doormat wall hanging up on the wall with some snowflakes hanging down from the ceiling above.

I placed some greenery, my beautiful alabaster lamp, and a sweet church building inside a glass lidded jar.

Next, the tree!

I found two sets of these green glass ornaments for $4 each while thrifting this year! Instead of hanging them with the metal hooks, I tied them onto the branches with velvet ribbon.

Then, I made some tiny books in some of our favorite titles.

How to Make Mini Book Christmas Ornaments

I was inspired to do this DIY by Sherry over at Canterbury Cottage on YouTube.

You can purchase these mini-composition books, 3 for $1 at the Dollar Tree (you need to buy a minimum of 12 for $5 when you purchase online.).

Then you simply find images online of the books you want to recreate and adjust them to size (I used Canva and set them to 6 1/2 x 4″ ), print on cardstock, and glue down onto the covers of the composition books.

I decided to use classic tales that were nostalgic for our family. If you’d like to use these same ones, you’re welcome to use this free printable I put together for you:

It includes:

• Heidi
• The Tale of Peter Rabbit
• Anne of Green Gables
• Billy & Blaze
• The Velveteen Rabbit
• The Nutcracker
• Charlotte’s Web
• The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe
• Carl’s Christmas

I’ve also been loving the look of tone on tone packages this year like these with red paper & red satin ribbon.

And that’s the mini tour of our English Cottage Christmas decorations in our main living space for this year!

Don’t forget your printable below!

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