Gingerbread House Inspired Christmas Dining Room – Holiday Housewalk

Get ready for the holidays with these beautiful Christmas dining room decorating ideas. This gingerbread inspired decor creates a fun and festive space to enjoy throughout the season.

Welcome to our home! The Christmas home tours are always my favorite posts of the year and I’m so happy to be joining Jennifer Rizzo again for her Holiday Housewalk! There are 15 homes on the tour this year, each with their own unique style and design. There’s always so much beautiful Christmas inspiration for you. I hope you enjoy the tours as much as I do. If you would like to start the tour at the beginning, you can click on the button below!

For those of you coming over from My Sweet Savannah  – I’m so glad you’re here! I always love seeing Melaine’s home all decorated for the holidays. She adds such a gorgeous, simple touch to her spaces with lots of fun DIY projects. Her DIY gingerbread village would actually go perfect in our dining room that I’m sharing with you! If you haven’t had a chance to drop by, you can click on the button below to tour.

Christmas Dining Room

Today, I’m going to be showing you around our gingerbread house inspired Christmas dining room. If you saw our dining room last Christmas, you can see that there have been lots of changes since last year! We’ve actually done quite a few renos over this past year {that I still need to post about!} including new paint and natural hickory wood flooring throughout our main floor. Of course, once that was done, I felt our dining room needed some updating too!

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Christmas Dining Room Decorating Tips

Our dining room is actually the first room that you see when you come in our front door, so I do really like to dress it up for the holidays. It was extra fun to decorate this year since it was kind of a new space for me with all of the updated furniture. Today, I thought I would share my decorating tips for dressing up your own dining room for the holidays.

Pick a theme or color scheme.

I always pick a theme, color scheme or inspiration piece as a starting point for any room that I’m decorating. This year, this cute gingerbread house cookie jar from Pottery Barn was my inspiration for the room. {It looks like it’s sold out but there are still lots of other fun gingerbread pieces left from the collection}. I used various shades of brown throughout the room along with gold accents and lots of greenery.

I always organize our Christmas decorations by color and theme when I store them away, so it’s easy to pull things that I already have to add to the space. If you like to switch up your decor like I do, this makes such a difference!

Add a little homemade.

While I absolutely LOVE shopping for Christmas decor, I also like to add some handmade crafts to our decor. I have lots of little DIY projects mixed around the room and and on the tree. I think these cinnamon snowflake ornaments turned out so cute and they smell amazing. I hung most of them from the trees with fishing wire and added the remaining ones to the garland.

 

They’re super easy to make with only 4 supplies needed. I’ll post the tutorial sometime this week if you want to create some of your own. I still have one more batch that I’m going to make for the Christmas tree and plan on adding in some gingerbread men as well.

Dried oranges are another easy handmade Christmas craft that you can do. You can find the simple tutorial HERE. Use them for filler, add to greenery, make garlands, or create your own Christmas tree ornaments. They can be used for many years and just get a richer, deeper amber color over time. I used these on the tree and strung them out on the garland over the light as well.

You can even make your own coasters using thick felt and a paint pen.

Mix Holiday Items with Functional Pieces

When you’re decorating a dining room, mix in some of your favorite decor pieces with functional items. Cake stands work great to provide added height when needed and serving bowls can be used to hold napkins, towels, or other serving ware. Use serving boards for a base or stack it behind your items for added interest and color.

I spent months trying to decide on some kind of cabinet for this room and finally purchased this Hardy bar cart from Pottery Barn. It’s my favorite thing in the room and I’ve already had lots of fun styling it for a few different seasons. For Christmas I used it to hold a couple of lighted gingerbread houses, some Santa Espresso mugs, serving boards, cake stands, and then a variety of Christmas bells, ornaments and greenery.

I also really like using napkins and towels to add a nice pop of color to the space. They’re inexpensive and can always be used!

Create a hot chocolate bar or other beverage bar.

One of my favorite things to do at Christmas is to put together a hot chocolate bar. It’s so fun to come up with different themes and ways to display all of the goodies!

I found these glass tree jars in the dollar section of Target and thought they would be perfect for hot chocolate and marshmallows.

I made these custom coffee bar labels for our syrups a couple of years ago and still use them. It looks like I might need to add a gingerbread label to the collection!

Layer on the greenery.

Investing in some beautiful greenery is definitely worth it as these pieces will be used year after year. I’m really loving all of the “real touch” greenery that has come out over the past few years and I’ve been gradually adding to my collection little by little. The Afloral real touch Norfolk pine garlands tend to sell out EARLY {like often October!}, but I’ve seen them come back into stock on Amazon though for short periods of time. I’ve also purchased very similar real touch garlands at Home Sense and Home Goods, like the pine garland that’s on the buffet.

The first thing that I thought of when I saw this light fixture was that it would look fabulous draped in some greenery for Christmas. lol! I add a string of dried oranges and hung some paper snowflakes from it.

Add a tree.

There’s no better way to make your space feel like Christmas than adding a tree! It doesn’t have to be a full size tree – even a little tabletop tree or smaller floor tree will add that Christmas magic! This Christmas tree is actually still a work in progress. I still have some gingerbread ornaments that I need to make and have a few ideas for some gingerbread wrapping ideas too.

I used various brown, white and gold ornaments for the tree with these DIY orange slice ornaments.  The velvet ribbon that I used throughout the room is tied on to the branches for an extra pop of color and texture.

It’s always fun to decorate under the tree as well and get creative with your wrapping. I used some of the same velvet ribbon as the tree as well as some pretty green satin ribbon.

This little Christmas mouse is a favorite of mine and different versions of him can be found all over the house.

Light it up.

Of course, I’m saving the best thing for last – the lights! I wish I was better at photography so I could really capture how pretty it looks when everything is all lit up at night.

Nothing really beats the beauty of Christmas lights! I use the GoSund plugs for all of our Christmas lights that need to be plugged in. They’re truly a game changer! They turn on and off through an app on your phone so I can have all of our Christmas lights turned on and off in the house in just a couple of seconds. They have saved me many times from having to get out of bed in the middle of the night to unplug our Christmas lights! {NOTE: They also work for Alexa and Google Home but I haven’t actually tried it myself.}

For our battery-operated lights and candles, I try to stick with ones that have a timer, so you just have to set them once and forget about them. Most stay on for 5-6 hours and work on a 24 hour timer. I have mine set so they come on around 4:30 each night just as it gets dark.

I love all of the other lights reflecting off the glass in the cabinets..

More of Our Christmas Home Tour

Thank-you so much for joining me today! I hope you were able to get some Christmas decorating inspiration for your own home. I still have lots of Christmas decor to share with you, so I hope you follow along to see the rest of our home all decorated for Christmas. Our front porch, kitchen, living room, and master bedroom will all be up in the next week or two. Here’s a little sneak peek of our kitchen for you…

And if you’re more into neutrals, I did a classic green and white calming color scheme in our bedroom…

If you’re new around here, I’d love to stay in touch! You can subscribe to my email over on the sidebar to be notified of new posts or you can always find me here…

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Before you go, don’t forget to visit the next home on our Holiday Housewalk – Zevy Joy. I know you’ll love Annie’s beautiful, traditional home, so please drop by and say hello!