As my son was walking up to go to bed last night after a fun Christmas Day, he paused on the stairs to ask why we would keep up the tree after Christmas. It was a fun day, but a long day, and my legs ached from running about the house all day cooking and cleaning. What came to mind immediately was to say “because no way mommy works this hard to get things ready for Christmas just for things to come down the next day.” That pretty much sums up my approach to decorating for the holiday – to decorate for the season so that I don’t feel like things need to be taken down immediately after a particular day on the calendar. New this year were the details we added to the porch, which consisted mainly of a set of new pillow covers, with a couple given special touches with custom stencils. The images of the snowflake and deer bring to mind winter for me more so than Christmas, and I will happily enjoy the porch and its pillows after December 25th.

These inexpensive pillow covers from Ikea (links here and here) were the perfect way to freshen up the tired looking porch pillows.
I found these designs doing a simple Google search, printed on regular paper and transferred to sheet material for the stencil.

Reality Check. You may be thinking that it’s awfully odd to decorate a porch that you can’t use during a Minnesota winter, and I agree with you. But perhaps the best part is that it looks exactly like this, all the time. I can keep the rest of my house tidy for approximately 5 minutes at a time. The porch is off of the dining room and through a French door, so the décor is visible when we are entertaining. It’s like a tiny bubble of the house where kids aren’t allowed.