Martha Stewart Christmas Decorations: 22 Heirloom Ideas Inspired by the Queen of Holiday Style

Some houses look dressed for one photograph and bare everywhere else. A Martha Stewart Christmas does not work that way: every room gets finished, down to the soap dish in the powder room, because a guest notices the room she did not expect you to bother with.

The palette stays narrow on purpose, antique green and crisp white, with silver and gold doing the shine. The motif is mercury glass, a ball ornament in one room, a cluster of votives in another, a bowl of them on a console, next to dried hydrangea that goes brown-green at the edges and bottle brush trees in miniature forests instead of one big tree trying to say everything.

This suits a house that already owns a few good things, a grandmother’s ornament box, a set of real candlesticks, and wants them to finally look like a collection instead of a drawer. If your home runs smaller or newer, the same palette shrinks happily onto a console table and a windowsill, no staircase required.

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The Rooms You Walk Into First

These are the scenes a guest sees before she takes her coat off, so they carry the most weight and the least clutter.

The Living Room, Fully Lit

A tree alone in a dark corner looks like an obligation. Give the whole room the same treatment: a velvet skirt in antique green pooled at the base, mercury glass balls mixed with a few painted glass birds, and warm white bulbs instead of cool.

Keep the sofa throws and the lamp bases in the same family of silver and gold so the tree stops being the only dressed thing in the room. If your space is small, one well-lit corner does the same job as a whole wall of greenery.

The Front Door Wreath

A plastic wreath from the drugstore says you ran out of time. A fuller one, heavy with dried hydrangea tucked into faux noble fir and tied with a wide silk ribbon, says the opposite, and it takes fifteen minutes to hang.

Keep the ribbon in antique green or gold, never both at once on the same wreath. Carrying the same greenery onto the porch and railings makes the whole front of the house read as one decision.

The Entry Console

An empty console table under the mirror looks bare the moment coats start piling onto it. A small forest fixes that without taking up any floor space at all.

Stand three bottle brush trees in graduated heights, flank them with a pair of mercury glass candlesticks, and let a shallow bowl of extra ball ornaments catch the overflow. On a renter’s budget, the trees alone, without the candlesticks, still read as finished.

The Staircase

A bare banister reads as an afterthought the second someone climbs it. If your house has no staircase at all, the same garland works wrapped along a narrow hallway instead.

The Banister Garland

A bare staircase in December looks like it belongs to a different, less festive house. Garland fixes that from the first step, and it photographs better than almost anything else you will hang this year.

Wire it loosely so it swags rather than hugs the rail, and tuck mercury glass ball clusters into every third loop instead of lighting the whole thing evenly. A tight budget version skips the lights and leans on the ornaments alone.

The Newel Post

The bottom of the banister always looks unfinished once the garland runs out, like a sentence with no full stop. One good finial ends it properly.

A single large mercury glass ball, wired on with a fat bow in antique green, does the job in under a minute. For a straight rail with no post at all, tie the same bow to the lowest baluster instead.

The Mantel

The mantel is the one surface everyone photographs without meaning to, so it earns the most layering in the house.

The Mantel Garland

A mantel with nothing on it reads cold even with a fire going underneath. Give it real depth: layer faux cedar low, then a second shorter length of eucalyptus on top so it has more than one plane.

Tuck in dried hydrangea heads where the two greens meet and let a few picks trail down over the edge. Six feet covers most standard mantels with a little spill on each side.

The Stockings

Mismatched stockings from three different Christmases look like clutter the moment they hang in a row. Buy them as a set and they instantly read as one household’s tradition instead.

Velvet in antique green and crisp white, alternating, holds up better than felt and takes monogramming well if that is the kind of finishing touch this house goes in for.

The Mirror Above

The space between the mantel garland and the mirror often sits empty and nobody notices why the whole wall feels unfinished. A pair of tall tapers on candlesticks, reflected twice in the glass, fills exactly that gap.

Keep the candles in crisp white so the flame reads warm against the silver frame, not competing with the green below. Flameless versions work just as well if small children are circling the room.

The Dining Table

This table gets dressed twice a day during the season, once for breakfast light and once for candlelight, and it should hold up to both.

The Centerpiece

A bare table runner down the middle of a long table looks like it is waiting for something to arrive. Dried hydrangea in a low mercury glass bowl, spilling slightly past its own edges, is the something.

Keep it low enough that guests can see each other across it, under ten inches is the safe rule. Add a few loose mercury glass balls rolling at the base for the moments candlelight catches them.

The Place Setting

White china alone at each seat looks like any other dinner the rest of the year. A cloth napkin in antique green, tied with a sprig of dried hydrangea instead of a printed tag, makes it unmistakably this one.

Linen napkins hold a crisp fold better than cotton, and they go straight back into rotation in January, nothing seasonal about the fabric itself, only the trim.

The Sideboard Forest

A sideboard that only holds serving dishes the rest of the year looks naked without them out during dinner. Line up a small forest instead, heights staggered, colors alternating green, silver and gold.

Five trees is enough to read as a scene rather than a single decoration. This is the one spot in the house where you can be generous with bottle brush trees and it still looks intentional, not excessive.

The Chandelier

A chandelier left bare over a fully dressed table suddenly looks like the one thing you skipped. Glass icicle ornaments hung from a few arms, not all of them, catch the candlelight without turning the fixture into a craft project.

A thin loop of gold ribbon at the top of each arm hides the hook. Leave the bulbs themselves alone, this is one of the few places in the house that does not need its own lights.

The Windows

A window left dark at four in the afternoon undoes everything you did on the mantel. Light them from the street side in, not just from inside the room.

Each Window, Wreathed

A dark window at dusk undoes the whole front of the house no matter how good the door looks. Hanging a wreath on every one, inside facing out, is the move that actually gets noticed from the street.

Keep every wreath identical so the row reads as one gesture rather than four separate decisions. A single suction hook per window is the whole installation, nothing drilled, nothing permanent.

The Windowsill Tree

A windowsill without a tree looks like an afterthought once the wreath above it is up. One small lit tree, battery powered so there is no cord trailing across the sill, finishes the pair.

Choose one in silver or antique green rather than a mix, so it sits quietly rather than competing with the wreath glass behind it. This is the cheapest full scene in the house.

Wrapping the Gifts

The parcels under the tree are decoration too, and they are the cheapest zone in the whole house to get right.

The Wrapping Station

A stack of mismatched paper under the tree looks like it got finished in a hurry at eleven at night. Two rolls, one solid antique green and one in a soft gold foil, wrap everything in the house with no decisions left to make.

Tie every parcel the same way, a wide ribbon crossed once, and the whole pile under the tree reads as one wrapped gift the size of a room. For a weekend project with the kids, pair the wrapping afternoon with something to play once the paper runs out.

The Gift Tags

A printed sticker tag looks fine until it sits next to parcels this carefully wrapped, and then it looks like the one shortcut in the whole pile. A plain kraft or white tag, handwritten, closes the gap for almost nothing.

A sprig of dried hydrangea slipped under the ribbon knot does the decorating for you, no glue, no glitter mess on the carpet afterward.

The Powder Room

This is the room a guest actually stands alone in with time to look around, so it cannot be the one you forgot.

The Hand Towels

A guest standing alone at the sink has nowhere else to look but the towel rack, so a tired everyday towel undoes the rest of the house in one glance. Four fresh ones in antique green, embroidered at the edge, fix that completely.

Linen dries hands faster than cotton and looks better wet, which matters more here than almost anywhere else in the house.

The Soap

A pump bottle of hand soap in the wrong color is a small thing, but it is the thing she will actually touch. A single bar, pressed with a pine or holly motif, sitting on a dish, upgrades the whole sink for the price of one bar of soap.

Choose a milled soap over a liquid one here. It lasts the whole season and never leaves a plastic bottle visible on the counter.

The Powder Room Candle

An unlit room smells like nothing at all, which is its own small disappointment after everything else in the house got this much attention. One candle, something green and resinous rather than sweet, solves it before anyone says a word.

Keep the vessel in frosted or mercury glass so it matches the dish and the towels without anyone having to notice it was matched on purpose.

The Quiet Corners

The corners nobody gathers in still get seen, on the way to the bathroom, on the way to bed, on the way to the ice bucket.

The Guest Room Bedside

A guest unpacking in a plain room notices the one thing missing faster than she notices everything you got right elsewhere in the house. A tiny bud vase with one stem of dried hydrangea on the nightstand says this room got thought about too.

Pair it with a single mercury glass ornament left in a small dish, the kind of detail she will mention on the way out.

The Kitchen Window

A kitchen left undecorated while every other room gets the full treatment feels like the house stopped halfway through. Three tea towels in rotation over the oven handle, antique green with a thin gold stripe, finish it without a single breakable object near the stove.

Hang a small wreath on the cabinet above the sink where steam never reaches it. Nobody expects a kitchen to match the dining room this closely, and that is exactly why it works.

The Bar Cart

A bar cart left as-is through the holidays looks like it belongs to a different season entirely. A mercury glass ice bucket and a stack of cocktail napkins turn it into the one corner guests actually linger near all night.

Twenty napkins cover a full party without anyone running out halfway through the evening, and the ice bucket earns its keep well past January.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I get the Martha Stewart Christmas look without her budget?

Start small and let the palette carry it rather than the spend: one narrow color story in antique green, silver and gold across every room reads as considered even when every single piece was inexpensive. A cohesive palette, mixed ornament shapes and layered greenery do most of the work before a single expensive object enters the room.

What colors does Martha Stewart actually use for Christmas decorating?

Her own rooms lean heavily on metallics paired with green, with gold, silver and copper repeating from the tree to the sideboard. In her own words about one recent season, she described filling rooms with trees in gold, silver, and green glistening with ornaments, kept consistent room to room rather than switching palettes at each doorway.

How many Christmas trees does a house like this actually need?

More than one, and that is the point rather than the excess. A tabletop tree on a console, another on a windowsill and a cluster on a sideboard do more for a house than a single oversized tree ever could, in keeping with the idea that one can never have too many trees during the holidays.

What are bottle brush trees and where do they go?

They are small bristled trees, often under two feet tall, used in clusters rather than alone, usually on consoles, sideboards or windowsills where a full-size tree would not fit. The format has stuck around partly because it was developed for a holiday collection and scales down a big-house look to a single tabletop.

Why does mercury glass look so much more expensive than regular glass ornaments?

The silvered interior catches candlelight and lamplight in a way that flat colored glass simply does not, which is why vintage mercury glass baubles and hand painted figurines keep getting cited as the look that evokes a heirloom, handed-down feeling rather than a store-bought one.

How far in advance should I start decorating a whole house this way?

Work from the rooms guests see first backward: living room and front door in the first weekend, staircase and mantel the second, table and small corners the week before anyone arrives. Spreading it over two or three weekends keeps any one day from feeling like a production.