5 Christmas Décor Styles — and How to Recreate Them in Your Home

You spend the entire year thinking about ways to improve the look and function of your interior spaces, and curating your furniture and décor to fit your aesthetic style and needs. Then Christmas rolls around, and you throw up any old decorations you find in your garage.

Your home deserves to be as immaculately decorated during the holiday season as it is for the rest of the year. To help you develop a more cohesive Christmas style, here are the most famous themes for holiday décor and how to achieve them in your home.

Traditional

Traditional Christmas decorations rely on the most well-known and most beloved symbols of the holiday season. In a home decorated in the traditional style, you are likely to see a real (or high-quality faux) Christmas tree with simple round ornaments, pine garlands, holly and mistletoe, nutcrackers, golden and silver bells, large felt stockings hung on the fireplace mantle and perhaps a few nativity scenes and heavenly angels to remind visitors of the true meaning behind the holiday.

The traditional look is timeless and sophisticated. If you want your home to feel respectable and virtuous, the traditional style will suit you well. However, you should be careful to consider comfort in your décor plans as well, especially if you will be hosting many holiday events come to Christmastime.

Whimsical

The whimsical Christmas style is playful and cheerful, imbuing spaces with the delight and fun that children tend to experience during the holiday season. Whimsical décor integrates bright and eye-catching colors, often beyond the traditional red, green, white, and gold, with a rainbow of hues in garlands, ornaments, and even large décor like wreaths and trees. The extra color provides a festival-like atmosphere, creating even more excitement during the holiday season.

Another way to manage the whimsical style is to accrue Christmas decorations around a particularly fanciful theme. For example, you might transform your home into a fairytale landscape with an abundance of elements like oversized mushrooms, tiny fairy homes, and twinkling lights. As long as your home imbues visitors with a sense of childlike wonder and thrill, you will have achieved the whimsical décor style.

Modern

The modern interior design movement is characterized by straight, clean lines, natural materials, simple color schemes, and minimalism. In terms of Christmas decorating, modern homes typically invest only in a few key pieces of holiday décor, so as not to overwhelm the home with festive clutter. Decorations tend to be simple and unassuming, and they may even be somewhat abstract, like an outline of lights on the wall in lieu of a real Christmas tree.

Decorating for Christmas in the modern style makes sense if your home already has a heavily modern interior aesthetic. Generally, you want your interior design to be cohesive, even during the holiday season. However, if you do not already have a modern home, you might enjoy modern holiday décor if you value the efficiency of space and want to reduce waste associated with Christmas decorations.

Rustic

Rustic Christmas decorations come from the country and farmhouse interior design aesthetic. This holiday decorating style utilizes vintage, aged, and somewhat distressed décor, which harkens to the past and a culture that values comfort and connection over material goods. When pursuing rustic Christmas décor, you should prioritize the use of warm and natural materials that you might pull directly from a winter forest, like live edge wood and pinecones. However, you should also rely heavily on textiles, like holiday pillows and plush blankets, to make your spaces incredibly inviting.