Magical but Simple Christmas Decor on a Budget

If I can put this together without a Walmart or Hobby Lobby around and on a tight budget, you most certainly can. Magical But Simple Christmas Decor on a Budget.

I believe in you!

I’ve hesitated to write a post like this because all of the home tours I’ve seen on Pinterest that are absolutely amazing but I thought others might not have the budget either to pull those ideas off. So why don’t I share our simple and inexpensive Christmas ideas.

Here’s our simple Christmas décor!

When we first arrived to this country all I brought that you could consider Christmas decor was two stockings. That was it. And to my astonishment everything here, Christmas related was outrageously priced, so I began making our ornaments and Christmas decorations. I repurposed lots of items around our house and just added a view pine branches in them to make them holidayish. A lot of our décor is a mix of homemade stuff and items I have found on sale that I’ve collected in the past couple of years.

Here’s our dinner table centerpiece with our Christmas ADVENTure cards on it. The kids pick from this stack of cards each night and we enjoy a short reading and Christmas related activity.

Here’s an up close picture of our nature inspired centerpiece.  It’s simple and easy to put together. I just used pinecones and berry garland and I repurposed a candle holder that we use year round. The red felt placemats are the 1/2 off bins at Hobby Lobby.

In our dining room is our Christmas village. And of all our Christmas decor this is probably the most expensive thing we own. Each year, for the past 5 years we’ve bought 1 house (they are really expensive here) and slowly we have created our very own little Christmas village. The first year the town looked pretty sad as there was only one house. You can also purchase these after Christmas and stock up on items for really cheap.

Let’s move on to the living room. From the dining room area, you take a few steps down into the living room. Around the stairs, I decorated the garland with candy. The round circle candies are made from Styrofoam circles.  I also made the pillows that spell out J O Y. Also, the blue pillows I use year round but they went well with the decor in the room.

Here’s our Christmas tree, I went with a gingerbread man theme this year.  I love how it turned out and most of our ornaments are homemade on this tree. All of the gingerbread men are homemade, some are made from felt others are clay. I also made the cupcake ornaments and lots of others ones you can’t see.

You can’t see it clearly but I made the gingerbread men garland that is wrapped all around the tree which also make it look full. I show you HERE how to make the gingerbread garland. I bought a few large ornaments to add some depth to the tree. The vertical ribbon also makes the tree look so full.

I love how it looks with the lights on at night!

This is our homemade nativity made from toilet paper tubes craft, it sits in the middle of the living room so the boys can play with it as they please. We have a ceramic nativity that has Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus… in a different box to be opened up each day, it’s called What God Wants for Christmas but since I made our own Christmas Advent we just use this one as decoration under the tree.

This table sits behind our couch. I made the red, bronze and ivory trees behind the feliz navidad decoration.  I never got around to making a tutorial for it but the red ones are from tissue paper and the other two are made from ribbon. I used poster board for the base instead of a foam cone.

This is our over the fireplace mantle, I share here 5 tips on how to position things on your mantle.  Again it’s simple but I really like it.  I made a chalkboard from a cabinet door and I use this year round.  The wooden Christmas trees were made by my 7 and 4 year old in “wood class” or daddy’s wood class I should day. The “believe” sign is made from red poster board.

Here’s the view of our whole living room.  My biggest tip I’ll share that will help you to decorate on a dime for Christmas is stock up on ribbon, lights and garland in the after Christmas sales. But even if you don’t make it to those sales, ribbon is inexpensive.  These items serve as great filler material which helps bring your decor together and it also makes areas look more full.