Coastal Christmas Tree

I am so so excited to be participating in this year’s Home for Christmas blog hop hosted by CountryLiving.com and Hometalk.com.  I was tasked with creating amazing Christmas decor and I can think of nothing more amazing in my house than my Coastal Christmas Tree.

Coastal Christmas Tree

 

Our dream was to live at the beach and it took us a LONG time to get here. We thought that we would never be able to live at the beach because beach town are usually way out of our price range.  But we found Wilmington, NC and my husband’s company actually had a office there. A job opening came up and we jumped on the chance to get out of the snowy winters in Maryland. We love it here and never plan on leaving.  We spend almost every weekend during the summer on the sand and we take pictures there every Christmas Eve and send them to our friends who are snowed in up North 🙂  Our house is decorated in a coastal theme so we chose to go with a coastal themed Christmas tree this year.

When I was unpacking our ornaments, I found some blue, silver and white balls that I had purchased after Christmas last year and totally forgot about. Don’t you love it when that happens? In addition to the balls, we covered the tree with seashells, starfish, oyster shells and seaglass ornaments.

For the seashell and oyster ornaments, we went down to the beach one afternoon and hit the motherload.  Seriously, I had never seen so many big intact shells. It was such a great seashell hunting afternoon and we even found a starfish! If you don’t have access to seashells, you can purchase some here. (affiliate link). All we did to convert the shells into ornaments was to spray them with flat white spray paint (affiliate link), drill a couple holes and thread some twine through the holes.

We also had some sentimental beach themed ornaments that we had purchased on our beach vacations (before we lived here).  I love this little Santa in a lifeguard chair that we got on a trip to the Outer Banks.

We purchased the starfish from Michaels and also used burlap for our garland.

Here is the tree with our Christmas mantel decor. Can you spot the homemade ornament (from wrapping paper) that my son made?

Make sure to check out #HomeforChristmas on Hometalk.com and CountryLiving.com social media for more inspiration and check ou more amazing Christmas ideas from these talented bloggers: