I absolutely LOVE Christmas, what about you?
I try my best to be as organised as possible every year and 2020 is no exception. In an effort to spread some festive cheer, I have put together a guide to make the holiday season a bit more special, even if we can't celebrate how we'd like to.
Christmas music
I find that festive tunes always get me in the mood for Christmas, so here are my favourite seasonal picks.
Christmas Songs For The Car:
Do They Know It’s Christmas – Band Aid
Fairytale of New York – The Pogues
Driving Home For Christmas – Chris Rea
Santa Claus is Coming To Town – Jackson 5
Step Into Christmas – Elton John
Christmas Wrapping – The Waitresses
Last Christmas – Wham!
Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town – Bruce Springsteen
Christmas Songs For Home:
All I Want For Christmas Is You – Mariah Carey
The Little Drummer Boy/Peace On Earth – Bing Crosby and David Bowie
Blue Christmas – Elvis Presley
Baby It’s Cold Outside – Dean Martin
Happy Xmas (War Is Over) – John Lennon & Yoko Ono
White Christmas – Bing Crosby
Stay Another Day – East 17
It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas – Michael Buble
Christmas Cards and Envelopes
Clare Fisher Illustrator always does ours and makes a small change, it gets delivered by end October so I have time to send out to everyone. This year we did Cassandra in Love That Red and for Christmas she gave me longer legs!
I buy these envelopes I buy from All Colour. They come in 1,000 so lasts a couple of years. Doing the cards and envelopes this way is actually cheaper than buying packs which are expensive I think.
For the back of my cards I like to seal them with a holiday sticker and found these cute ones at Oliver Bonas.
Christmas Gift Wrapping
I also go through loads of gift tags and picked some up at Oliver Bonas just before lockdown – see it pays to do it early!
I love these sausage dog gift tags and these Christmas tree ones!
The trees are my favourite and I wish I bought more, but I have leftover tags from previous years so am using those up.
My moto is ‘done is better than perfect’ so just get that gift tag on the present and send it off or put it under the tree!
Wrapping paper I buy from HomeSense, they have really good thing beautiful paper and I always go to buy it at the end of October. They have amazing brands such as Sleigh Hill, Well Dressed Home, Queen West Trading Company and Bella Lux. They are all super luxe and better quality that I have found anywhere at a knocked down price!
My moto is ‘done is better than perfect’ so just get that gift tag on the present and send it off or put it under the tree!
Wrapping paper I buy from HomeSense, they have really good thing beautiful paper and I always go to buy it at the end of October. They have amazing brands such as Sleigh Hill, Well Dressed Home, Queen West Trading Company and Bella Lux. They are all super luxe and better quality that I have found anywhere at a knocked down price!
HomeSense don’t have great ribbons so I always buy those from Amazon. This year I found great gingham ones, and I love clashing the prints. I look for wire edge ribbon so the bow stands up and looks great.
Christmas Trees, Garlands and Wreaths
Our Christmas Tree, door wreath and fireplace garland are from Balsam Hill. The quality and choice is amazing! They come with protective storage bags, we have had ours for years now and we won’t need to replace it for god knows how many years – the quality is too good you almost need to get sick of it as you won’t need to replace it.
See them here.
All of our decorations I have been collecting for years and years and pack them away by colour/style each year so they are always perfect when they come back out. I buy a few ones each year and HomeSense have a really good selection of the beautiful handmade Polish glass ones towards Christmas that are super cheap, so that is the time to top up!
Christmas Cake
The Christmas cake I make is by Merry Berry and I’ll be doing it on Instagram so you can cook along with me! The recipe is here.
Christmas Morning Breakfast
On Christmas morning for breakfast we have kedgeree and champagne. Dazzler made it during lockdown the first time around and you can find how he makes it by watching the video below:
Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas & Happy New Year.
