A few weeks ago, I Instagrammed this photo of the great and mighty tree of a thousand and one lights…

Actually, we’re not sure how many lights it has, but it sure did take Greg a good long time to string them all on. In addition to our tree in the living room, we decided to put up a second tree in the foyer.

This tree isn’t just any tree, though. It belonged in my grandparent’s home here in Virginia before they decided to downsize and move to Florida. No one can decorate for Christmas like my Grandma. Every year, that house looked like it belonged in a magazine. They had fresh magnolias and berries (that were cut from trees on their property) all over the house and Christmas touches with an incredible attention to detail in every room… it was perfection. They had three big Christmas trees, including this tall, skinny tree, affectionately dubbed “the junk tree”. Grandma’s version of a “junk tree” didn’t include much “junk” though, haha. If you know my Grandma, you just had a good chuckle. It had multicolored lights, faux poinsettias, and lots of colorful and memorable family ornaments. I’m determined to find a photo of it as she had it decorated back in the day. Maybe next year! 

When they moved out of their Virginia home, (I was about 16 at the time) they had an estate sale to sell the furniture they didn’t want to take with them to the new home in Florida. Long story short, the skinny tree was taken out of the estate sale and officially belonged to me. Even though I was just 16, I wanted to keep it for my house one day. Eleven years later, it’s out of my parent’s attic, and finally has a new home in my “one day when I have a house” house.

A few nights ago, I went through all the ornaments and couldn’t get over how many of them brought back so many memories. In order to wrap my brain around how best to decorate our new/old “junk tree”, I picked out a few of my favorites and set them out on the sofa table along with a bunch of random ornaments Greg and I’ve been collecting over the past few years. Since I was working with a lot of vintage ornaments and most of the ornaments I’ve been collecting happen to be of the nostalgic kind, that seemed like a perfect theme for this tree. It’s what we’re calling “fun vintage”.

After seeing our new vintage-inspired TV in the front yard, a friend gave us a collection of Christmas TV ornaments (you can see a few of them in the photo above). How perfect is that?! We love them so much that this is going to be one of our favorite kind of ornaments to keep our eyes out for every year.

To serve as a “background”, I started looking for some plain ball ornaments. I finally found these at Target for only $5 a box. I love the color combo of sea foam green, red, blue, green, white and pink. It’s not a color palette I’d ordinarily pick for everyday decor, but I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to have some fun.

With our newly assembled ornament collection in tow, it was time to decorate the tree. We started out by putting on almost all of the ball ornaments, followed by some vintage-inspired Martha Stewart ornaments, and finally, the special ornaments. And here’s how it turned out…

Pretty fun and vintage-ish, right? I’m not totally digging the tree topper for this particular tree, but it’s what we’re working with right now until we find a better one. For the tree skirt, we just used a piece of burlap left over from another project. I actually have another window open on my browser right now, searching for a tree topper and tree skirt on Etsy.

To me, the TV ornaments really bring everything together and brings home the whole “vintage fun” theme. Here are a few more detail shots just for fun….

If you’ve been reading for a while, you know we couldn’t have a vintage-inspired junk tree without a nod to I Love Lucy. I put this one at eye level just so we’d see it every time we walk by.

And who didn’t have one of these growing up…

My favorite part about this ornament is that it came with this inside…

A Christmas light sticks in the back of it to make the it look like the inside oven light is on and it’s even lightly scented to smell like cake batter, haha.

I found these Martha Stewart ornaments at Home Depot (on the left). The colors and shape are so indicative of what my mom says what she remembers seeing on my Great Grandma Henderson’s tree when she was a little girl. So, I had to have them. I picked up a set of six for only $6! Thank you, Martha.

And yet another ornament that resembles our new yard decoration for this year…

To balance out the tree and finish off the little corner vignette, we hung some DIY wall art – which we’ll be talking more about on Friday. It happens to be my favorite Christmas project yet!

We love the glow the lights put off – especially at night. So much so, we’ve even put the tree on a timer so we can enjoy it when we go to sleep. Here’s the view from our bed at night…

That’s my kind of night light! Now I’m kind of wishing it wouldn’t be weird to keep it up all year long. ; )

I normally leave the decorating posts up to Ash, but she’s feeling a bit under the weather, so I’m taking over this one. Luckily, she’s already taken a bunch of photos, so you won’t have to deal with my lackluster photography skills ; )

Like a majority of the rest of the house, the guest room is in a constant state of flux. We’re constantly rearranging things, adding small details, and generally working to make the house fit our lifestyle and tastes. Up until last weekend, the guest room was serving as sort of a storage room of sorts of things that needed to be Criagslisted and a few other odds and ends we weren’t quite sure what to do with yet. But, seeing as how the holiday season is now here, we needed to get the room in shape for company. Though, we do have one notable update to share…

…we finally added sconces for either side of the bed. Find the same ones here. We really like the iron finish and the crisp white drum shades. We’ve heard from our guests that they’re very handy at night, as well. Ashley’s grandparents are avid readers, so they particularly enjoy using them when they stay with us.

Every time she walks into the guest room, Ash reminds me we really need to put something over the bed. We originally planned on hanging three frames above the bed (we actually even had the frames hung and waiting for art!) but we’ve recently been discussing something we’d like to do after the holidays that may or may not include a wall treatment for the wall the bed is on. Once that’s done, I think the room will finally start coming together.

Even though the guest room isn’t completely finished, we have a few friends and family who will be staying with us off and on over the next few weeks. In light of that, we decided to spread a little Christmas cheer for our overnight guests.

I promise Ash didn’t stage this when we took this photo. Bentley is just weird like that. Just in time for our guest room spruce-up, our friends at Target sent us a big box of holiday goodies from their Threshold line. By the way, this isn’t a Target Inner Circle gig, this actually came from another department within the Target family. Our Christmas-related Target Inner Circle activity will be coming up in a few weeks – and we’re really excited about it! 

In the big box, which Bentley quickly conquered,  was… 1. a Silver Wreath 2. a gold Cable Knit Throw, 3. a Golden Pinecone Candle (that smells really awesome, by the way), and 4. a Pine Tree Pillow. Using these things from Target, along with some stuff we already had in our Christmas decorations, we were able to come up with a fun, simple Christmas-ized vibe for our guest room. Here’s what we did…

As you can see already, we decided to use pops of red here and there. What’s more “Christmas” than red? We also thought it would contrast nicely with the different shades of blue used throughout the room. Listen to me getting all Vern Yip on you guys! The wreath went on the mirror above the dresser, which tied in with the gray bedding. It also looks great with the black frame of the mirror. (Much to Ashley’s surprise, I’m a huge fan of contrast and balance in colors and tones.)

I had to throw in this photo just because I thought it was cool. Plus, it shows the details of the wreath a little better.

On the right side of the dresser, we put two glass Christmas trees paired with what I like to call “the abstract snow man”. Ash picked it up at Hobby Lobby the other day for about $6 (on sale, down from $12). It’s probably meant to be decorated, but we thought it looked cool just like this. I think it’s a neat modern take on the snowman. The trees are from Tuesday Morning, but Ash bought them about 5 years ago, so it might be difficult to find them now. She actually used them in her college townhouse in Tennessee. They are super fragile, so we’re kind of surprised they’ve survived three states and five moves.

Over on the left side of the dresser is a tray (from Target) with a “twiggy” Christmas tree (from Cracker Barrel), an antique candy dish (from the Cold Harbor Antique Mall), and a rogue Christmas ornament.

We also included an extra house key for guests to use while they’re staying with us. To give it that extra Christmas spirit, Ash put a small red shatterproof ornament on the key ring.

On the bedside table, we replaced the faux white hydrangeas that normally sit there with the gold pinecone candle Target sent us. Even though mixing metals is sometimes considered a no-no, we are all for it. I actually like the way this particular shade of gold looks with the small silver frame. Inside the frame is a photo of Ash when she was a baby blowing bubbles with her Grandma. Since Ashley’s grandparents often stay with us when they come to Richmond, we thought this was a great place for the photo.

We brought this tired chair in here a few month ago when we decided to move it out of the living room, and, while we love the side table (we bought it from a store downtown a while back), we don’t quite know what to do with it just yet. That’s the reason this is our “hodgepodge” room at the moment. We’re planning on replacing the chair and side table with new ones once the room starts coming together more, but this is what we’re working with for now. Oh, and you may have noticed the rug. We actually bought that about a year ago. At the time, it seemed to fit the direction the room was going, but now, we’re not so sure. We’re planning on Craigslisting it down the road unless it miraculously goes with what we’re planning for this room in the future.

We were able to cozy up the corner with the throw blanket and pillow Target sent – both of which will go perfectly with what we have planned for this room! Ash loves the muted shade of yellow and actually used it as inspiration for a graphic design client she’s working with right now. The pillow is awesome, and really helps bring in the white accents from the other side of the room.

On the side table, we have our guest basket along with a little white pot from Ikea with a mistletoe plant and a few more rogue ornaments.

The “plant” is actually a ball of faux mistletoe we picked up from Target last year. By sitting it on top of the pot, it looks like a mini-topiary. I came up with that idea all on my own, and I have been tooting my own horn about it ever since!

Our guest basket is full of nice-to-have things for our overnight guests. This “winter edition” is stocked with three bottles of water, two Christmas coloring books and a box of crayons (fun for kids and the kids at heart), a small box of gourmet sugar cookies, the latest edition of Richmond Magazine, a Sudoku book, a deck of playing cards and a Snowman in a Box (just in case we get lucky with some snow). We also talk about this in our Target Inner Circle article that will be going up soon over on Target’s online magazine, A Bullseye View. We’ll be sure to let you guys know when it’s published!

That about wraps up what we’ve been up to in the guest room. Hopefully our friends and family that will be popping in and out over the next few weeks will feel comfortable in there – even though Ash is a wreck about it not being “finished” yet, haha. If you’ve felt like all of our posts lately are Christmas-related, it’s because they have been. I guess that’s bound to happen when we’re having fun decking our halls and we post just three days a week. But rest assured! We’ll be back Wednesday with a non-Christmas, house-related post!

The folks at Target gifted the four items mentioned above, but, as usual, the content and opinions in this post are our own.

It’s the last Friday of November, so that means it’s time for another installment of His + Her Favorite Things. Before we get to that, we wanted to share the little bonus project we were asked to do by Home Depot (check out our main project here). Knowing I’m on the geekier side of things, they surprised us with a Christmas lawn Yoda. Seeing as how my office was the “geek domain” of the house, we thought he’d fit in better in there. After all, I don’t think there were any small green aliens with Force powers in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. So, we were inspired to put together a Star Wars Christmas tree…

We’re anxious to add more ornaments to the tree throughout the season and years to come to make it a true “Greg tree”. For more about Yoda and the Star Wars tree, check out my post over at Home Depot here. And now, on with His + Her Favorites…

1 // Apple TV – Despite having featured the Roku on one of my previous lists, I ended up grabbing an Apple TV on Black Friday. Despite my initial doubts, it really has turned out to be a great set-top box. The interface is simple, easy to use, and generally slick. It also easily integrates with all of Ashley’s favorite Apple devices, so she’s on cloud nine. If you’re already invested in the Apple ecosystem, I don’t see any reason not to grab one of these little guys. It’s awesome.

2 // Nexus 7 – My Nexus 7 is my new pride and joy. I’m a huge fan of what Google has been doing with Android, and I’ve been wanting to pick up a tablet of some sort for a long time. When the price on the 16GB Nexus 7 dropped to $199, I knew I had to have it. I’ve had mine for about two weeks now, and it’s become a vital part of my personal technology infrastructure. (I’m totally going to coin that term if someone hasn’t already.) Books look great, it’s crazy fast, gets great battery life, and the size is perfect. (So perfect, in fact, that it fits nicely in my back pocket while I’m walking around the house or office!) If you’re looking for an Android tablet in the 7-inch range this holiday season, I whole-heartedly recommend this tablet.

3 // Big Bang T-Shirt – As much as I liked the show before, Ash and I’ve started watching Big Bang Theory pretty regularly over the last couple of months and we scored the first 5 seasons on DVD at Target on Black Friday. I think at this point I would label myself a true fan. In celebration of my graduation to fandom, I will be adding this Bazinga! shirt to my Christmas list this year. Hopefully someone I love and charish will find a way to make this appear under the tree this year! ; )

4 // WiFi Cufflinks – Anybody can carry a USB stick in their pocket. A geek with true class and style carries a USB drive and a WiFi router in his cufflinks. One cufflink hides a 2GB USB drive, while the other can be plugged into a computer to create a wireless network for file sharing. I don’t know if I’d ever buy these for myself, but it’s one of those gadgets worth sharing.

5 // Abingdon Laptop Bag – I’ve been on the lookout for a good laptop bag for work, and this one is near the top of my list. Honestly, the only reason it’s not already sitting next to my desk as I type this is my current work computer is 17″ wide, and this bag only fits 15″ laptops. However, in the spirit of sharing, I’ve put it on my favorite things this month. Hopefully, some lucky guy will find a brand new, stylish laptop bag in his office because of this!

1 // J.Crew DODOcase – Yes, I’m a self-proclamined Apple fan girl, but I’m currently iPad-less. Greg and I used to share one, but that went bye-bye when he switched jobs earlier this year (even though this new job is a major upgrade, an iPad wasn’t part of the deal). Greg has a Nexus 7, and I feel a little left out when he’s reading books on it and such (which is what he’s doing right now as I type, haha). That, along with the fact that it would be really helpful for my work and the blog, put an iPad officially on my short list of “things to get”. When I’ve got iPads on the brain, I can never resist looking at iPad covers. I think I’ve finally found “the one”. I love these preppy, fun colors paired with tiny polka dots. Btw, sweetheart, if you’re wanting to get me an iPad for Christmas, hint hint, I’d like a white one. ; )

2 // Kate Spade Earbuds – We have a few trips coming up around the first of the year, and I’ve been on the lookout for new earbuds for the flights. The old-style Apple ones hurt my ears and never stay in place (isn’t that weird?), so I’ve been keeping my eyes open for some that have the “cushy” part that goes in your ear to help them stay put. The colors are what got me hooked on these at first. Then, I fell in love with the fabric-covered cord. The fact that they’re Kate Spade didn’t hurt either!

3 // Holiday Nail Polish Set – Kate Spade has officially contributed to my nail polish obsession. I’m always inspired by their choice of color combos (I actually just used them as an inspiration for a recent design client) and the fact that I can now get the very colors that I’m so inspired by in nail polish form is definitely fun.

4 // Pavé Heart Earrings – I normally like chunky statement jewelry (especially necklaces) but when it comes to earrings, I like to keep things simple. These heart earrings are so sweet and dainty, and they would go with a bunch of different outfits.

5 // Bridal Key Fob – Even though this is technically a “Bridal” key fob and we’ve been married for four years, I love it! It’s so cute and understated, and I have a thing for gold these days. It would be a great stocking stuffer for the Mrs.

That wraps up this edition of His + Hers. Do you have any favorites these days? Oh, and while we’ve got you here, we wanted to say thanks for all of the kind words on Wednesday’s post! Ya’ll are the best! : )