Last Updated on August 25, 2022 by Kravelv
The winter holidays are about bringing your loved ones together to celebrate love, joy, light and life — and your decorations should reflect this. To prepare your holiday guests for the good cheer of the season, you should ensure that the most prominent spaces of your home are decorated to encourage wonder and excitement.
Yet, while you might have your home’s exterior delightfully illuminated and your larger gathering rooms decorated to bring warmth and fun, there is one important space in your home that might need more attention: your entryway. As the first area your guests will see upon stepping into your home, your entryway deserves bright and enticing holiday décor. Here are a few ideas for creating more holiday cheer in your entryway:
Bringing the Outside In
Your front porch and your entryway serve as the boundaries between your exterior and interior spaces. Thus, you should use both areas to slowly transition your guests from your yard to your home by mixing the feeling of the indoors and outdoors in both spaces. This is good advice for your year-round decorating strategy, but it is especially important when your property is exceedingly ornamented for the winter holidays.
First, you should bring the inside out, decorating your front porch with elements that encourage your visitors to feel warmed and welcomed. If you have any outdoor furniture on your porch, you might cover them with festive throw blankets and pillows, which will make the space feel more like home. You should hang some sort of décor, like Christmas wreaths, on your front door, and you might place some kind of potted plant, like mini Christmas trees or poinsettias, to frame the door. All of these decorations serve to blur the line between outside and inside.
Then, once you step into your home, you should continue this pattern of intermingling inside and outside. You might rely heavily on natural décor elements, like wreaths and garlands as well as pinecones, antlers and other rustic elements that feel like the outdoors. However, you should also place indoor décor that is specific to the holiday, like small ceramic Christmas trees or stockings. You might look for a seasonal coat rack or shoe box to give your guests a place to discard their outerwear before they venture deeper into your home for holiday festivities.
Thinking Simple and Bright
Your entryway is not the area where you want guests to congregate, as it will interrupt the flow of visitors into and out of your home. Thus, you want to decorate in ways that do not encourage people to linger — no family photos in this area — and that do not impede walkways — no decorations cluttering the floor. Instead, you should prioritize simplicity in this space, allowing it to look festive and fun without overshadowing the décor elsewhere in or around your home.
Substituting Everyday Décor
The easiest strategy for decorating your entryway during the winter holidays is to substitute your year-found decorations with holiday appropriate alternatives. For example, you might replace any wall hangings with wreaths or stockings; potted plants can be covered in ornaments and lights; and décor on your entry table might be swapped with Christmas statues. Then, you are not taking up any more space with your décor than you usually do, allowing for seamless passage into the larger and more well-appointed rooms of your home. Plus, this strategy makes storage of your decorations much simpler, as you should be able to use the same boxes to store your everyday décor during Christmastime as you use to hold your entryway Christmas decorations for the rest of the year.
Prioritizing Cohesiveness
Last but certainly not least, you need to ensure that the style of your entryway matches both the aesthetic design of your holiday décor in the rest of your home as well as the look and feel of your exterior decorations. Before your guests step into your home, what they see in your yard and your entryway will set their expectations for your holiday decorating style throughout your home. You should try to maintain a cohesive theme and style everywhere on your property, especially in your entryway.
Decorations are not the most important concern for the winter holidays, but decorating appropriately can provide your home with a look and feel to put everyone at ease. By extending your holiday décor into your entryway, you can complete your holiday design and ensure comfort and satisfaction until the holidays conclude.