It’s been a funny ol’ year hasn’t it? Not funny as in ‘haha’ obviously just a strange beast. In years past, I would have fully thrown myself into the Christmas prep, planning my tree, planning my dining table, planning DIYs, buying ALL the bits and pieces to make all of that happen… and this whole process would have started back in early November. 

This year? Hmmm. It took me until the first weekend of the month to drag the tree and decor from the loft. While I would normally decorate my living room and dining room (and kitchen last year!), this year, I’ve decided the living room can get some simple treatment and the rest of the rooms can just stay as they are.

Whereas I’ve seen others putting up their trees in October (yes really!) desperate for a bit of sparkle after what has been a difficult year (and I totally get that), I think there are a few reasons why I’ve not gone all out this Christmas.

First, because we only just completed the work on my office/dressing room (apparently it’s called a ‘Cloffice’ – who knew) and whenever you are doing renovation work, the whole house very quickly becomes cluttered and dusty. Once we finished everything, I wanted to (literally) let the dust settle, get the rooms organised again and just enjoy having our house back to ‘normal’. Although due to my second point, this didn’t quite happen…

The second reason is that just after we finished up the renovation work on the offices, I started to receive the stock I was ordering in for Swoon Worthy Scents (you can read a bit more about that here). From wax to glass vessels to the bespoke packaging to wicks, labels, shipping boxes etc – my house was looking a bit like Amazon’s warehouse. I desperately needed to get some order in place, find homes for things and decide how and where everything would go so that it wasn’t taking over the whole house and I could actually make candles without tripping over 30 boxes all over the floor or have to rummage through 3 different rooms to find what I needed!

Along with that, my brain has pretty much been 100% occupied with getting everything to the point where I can properly launch. This has been an incredibly long process from the start but finalising the products, the packaging, the website (all of which I’m doing completely myself, there’s no team of Swoon Worthy elves and the animals are rubbish assistants) alongside the photography, making sure everything goes smoothly once I hit that ‘publish’ button, there hasn’t been that much room in my brain for anything else.

The final reason is just that with 2020 nearly behind us, I felt like I needed some breathing room in both a figurative and literal sense. This year has been tough in so many ways and whilst we’ve been incredibly lucky to have remained healthy and we’ve been able to continue working, I know that hasn’t been the case for so many others. So I’m reluctant to be pushing too much in the way of rampant consumerism that’s so common at this time of year. It just would have felt disingenuous of me. (For instance, I normally would have done a whole bunch of buying guides but this year, my heart just wasn’t in it).

So all that being said, I’ve decided to go into Christmas with a bit of a softer, easier approach. We are spending our Christmas in a simple way as well – just me, Wayne and the fur babies this year and we’re just going to make it a really nice day rather than travelling up and down the country as we normally do! I have to admit, I’m quite looking forward to that part of it.

I decided to go with just a single tree (my pink one I’ve had for a couple of years) and obviously from the pictures you can see, I decorated the mantle and put a few bits and pieces out. At night, the room glows in such a lovely way and I’m actually really enjoying the simplicity of it all. Of course, I am using my own candles in the room (no shame me!! lol) but I’ve turned the labels around so as not to spoil the surprise for when I do launch!

I didn’t even buy a single ornament this year, I haven’t spent any money apart from presents (and even that we’ve scaled back this year) so I’m really just trying to make it a calm and enjoyable month, grateful for the things we have and the good things that have come out of the past year. 

Of course, the biggest thing to come out of this year was starting a brand new business and I couldn’t be more excited about the launch of my upcoming home fragrance range and I’m so grateful for the support I’ve been receiving so far! I’ve been working on this side project since March but I’m finally close to sharing my creations. All going well, I expect to launch Swoon Worthy Scents in January 2021 (whoop!) so if you’d like to be the first to know when the site is live, you can sign up for the newsletter here or give me a follow over on Instagram.

So I apologise if you were hoping for a lot more in the way of Christmas decor and ideas this year but I’m really enjoying this much simpler approach. I’m hopeful things will be looking much different next year and I feel like I can go all out once more. Thanks so much for all your support this year and hope you have a very very Merry Christmas if you are celebrating and if not, that you have peace and love as we finish off a memorable year.