Decorating for Christmas on a budget

Are you feeling Christmassy?

It’s that time of year again. After an eventful and stressful year for many of us, you may be looking forward to taking a break, spending some time with friends and family, and celebrating the joy that Christmas can bring.

Decorating your home can certainly help to generate some Christmas spirit if you aren’t feeling ‘Christmassy’ just yet. But buying Christmas decorations from the shops can be expensive, and even a little tacky. And let’s face it, for something that only happens a few weeks a year, you may not feel that Christmas decorations are a sensible investment right now!

With that in mind, we wanted to offer you some ideas of how to decorate for Christmas on a budget.

There are plenty of items you can find around the place that can dress up your home beautifully. Here are some staples for a DIY Christmas: wood – crates, driftwood, twigs and boxes – always looks great, pieces of material in christmas colours, plant branches and vines, string and fishing wire, white (and maybe red) candles of various shapes and sizes, glass jars, bottle and glasses, fairy lights, pine cones, old tree baubles for upcycling, red, green and white coloured paper, glitter, and red, green and white ribbons.

Christmas mantle arrangement

This could be above a fireplace, a hall table, TV stand or any other shelf on display in your home.

• Make some cuttings from soft, leafy plants and tie them together to run across the length of your space.
• Drape fairy lights in and around the leaves.
• Purchase (or make) wooden letters to spell out “Christmas”, “Peace”, “Joy”, “Noel”, or whatever words inspire you and paint them to suit your décor. (Spotlight sell wooden letters for $1.40 per letter).
• Make paper snowflakes to stick or hang near your arrangement.

Candle display

• Find – or purchase – some plain glass jars or even plain drinking glasses. (These items are easily available and cheap from most large stores such as Kmart, Big W or Ikea.)
• Half-fill with Epsom salts to look like snow. You can even sprinkle some silver glitter in there, too.
• Place a tea light on top of the salt. You can also weave some soft leafy plant cuttings around the base of the glassware to add to the effect.

Dress up your candles

If you have any bigger standalone candles (ideally white, red or green) you can decorate them to create a Christmas vibe.  Here are a few ideas – you can mix and match them!

• Stick candy canes around the base of the candle.
• Paint them.
• Tie red or green ribbons around the middle of your candle.
• Make a wreath around the base by tying soft plant leaves You could add white painted twigs or driftwood and add a dash of red (Christmas bush, bottlebrush or any red plant is good for this).
• Put five or six candles in a crate or wooden box.

Table-top trees

• If you have any candlesticks or stands, you can turn these into Christmas trees! Roll some paper or cardboard into a long cone shape, tape it together and place it on top of your candlestick.
• Decorate with red, white or green fabric to look like a tree, or decorate the cones anyway you please.
• Even if you don’t have a candlestick, you can just place your Christmas tree cones on the table or shelf on their own.
• You could also put your trees in a crate or wooden box.

Table centrepiece

The key here is to keep it simple but use a mix of red, green and white to instantly give your table a Christmassy feel.

• Start with a table runner – all you need is some material that roughly runs the length of your table and fills about a third of the width. Use any shade of red, green or white. Then place your decorations on top of the runner.
• Candles always look good. Space plain, medium-sized red, white or green candles evenly along the table, placed in glass or glass bottles to protect the flames from catching anything.
• Upcycle old baubles – most of us have a collection of old baubles in a box from previous years. Keeping your colour scheme in mind, you can use a glitter pen to write Christmas words on the baubles, or one letter per bauble to spell out words. Place the baubles on “stands” – you could use upside-down glasses, painted or covered toilet rolls or even roll some cardboard into a cylinder yourself.
• White painted twigs or driftwood interspersed with natural brown twigs can also look lovely spread along the table runner, especially if you can weave some fairy lights through the twigs.

Hanging decorations

• 3D snowflakes, stars and trees are easy to make from red, white and green paper. If you have Google, and a bit of time, you can have lots of fun with this.
• Use fishing line to hang them. If you don’t have many spots to hang them from, you can run some fishing line across the ceiling from one point to another and then hang your decorations from this.

Christmas wreaths

• Wooden pegs, painted or decorated with coloured glitter and mounted on a cardboard, donut-shaped cut-out can look great. You can hang one of your handmade snowflakes in the centre and use a ribbon to hang it.

You can use a cardboard donut shape as a base for any sort of DIY wreath. Have fun mixing leaves, red baubles, pine cones (if you have them), twigs, glitter, string and ribbons to make your wreath more decorative.