CHRISTMAS Hey, happy holidays everyone! It’s Victoria here, from sfgirlbybay and I’m excited to be included in Emily’s first Holiday magazine. Let’s just get this out of the way right now…I’m not the biggest fan of green & red Christmas décor. At least not in my own home, it just doesn’t work with my vintage modern aesthetic. My home is a mixture of a lot of black and white, with pops of pink and other colors thrown in, but nowhere do you find red and green. So what to do about decorating for the holidays? Well, if you’re like me, you can still create a festive, holiday atmosphere, but one that is perhaps a little bit unexpected – with black, white, and shiny silver or gold metallics.
It creates a vintage-inspired, warm and sophisticated look, without a chubby red Santa in sight!
So, this year, I’m going to create a bright and shiny Christmas mantel as the focal point of my holiday décor. I’ve got this great old mantel I found at the salvage yard and hauled home a few years ago, and I’ve painted the walls around it chalkboard black – so when I added a few metallic decorations and lit a few candles it seemed to compliment the look perfectly!
Christmas isn’t complete without my mother decorating the dinner table with Christmas Crackers. It’s a British tradition, where colorfully decorated ‘crackers’ are typically pulled and pop open, spilling the contents which includes a paper hat crown which we are forced to wear throughout the dinner; a small toy, and a bad joke or piece of trivia we all read aloud. It definitely puts a festive and silly spin on a traditional sit-down dinner!
Victoria