How to Make Your Home Feel Like Christmas Without Buying More Decorations

If I could change only one thing to make a room feel cosier at Christmas, it would be the lighting.

Turn off the big overhead light. Use lamps. Switch on the Christmas-tree lights before it gets properly dark. Light candles. Let different little pools of warm light exist around the room rather than trying to illuminate every corner.

Our bioethanol fireplace comes on too, which adds another flickering layer of light.

By late afternoon, the whole atmosphere of the room changes. That’s when Christmas starts feeling real.

Don’t save candles for Christmas Eve. December is exactly when I want them on during an otherwise completely ordinary evening at home.

There is something about arriving home, closing the curtains and lighting a few candles that tells your brain the day has changed pace.

You don’t need twelve of them. One candle on the coffee table can be enough.

Your home can look like Christmas and still feel strangely quiet. Music fixes that remarkably quickly.

At ours, Christmas music starts creeping in during November. In the car, Christmas radio takes over. At home, I particularly love putting records on. Michael Bublé and Mariah Carey are Christmas staples, and our collection has grown because Bas often gives me another Christmas vinyl.

The slight ritual of choosing a record and putting it on makes it feel different from simply asking a speaker to play a playlist. Although I absolutely do that too.

The point is the sound.

Scent is one of the fastest ways to create a sense of season. It can come from a candle or home fragrance, but it doesn’t have to.

Coffee brewing. Cinnamon rolls warming in the oven. Something orange and spiced on the stove. Dinner cooking while it’s already dark outside.

Your house develops a Christmas scent almost accidentally when you start doing Christmas things in it. And that’s much more interesting than trying to make every room smell like an artificial pine forest.

One of my favourite ways to make home feel seasonal is ridiculously simple: change what you’re drinking.

Make the gingerbread latte. Use the Christmas mug. Add the cinnamon. Make proper coffee and sit down with it rather than carrying it around while doing six other things.

The drink isn’t really the point. It’s the five or ten minutes around it.

Not every Christmas moment needs to happen beside the main tree.

Put a tiny decoration near the coffee machine. Add something festive to a bookshelf. Leave a Christmas book on the coffee table. Put a little light somewhere you normally wouldn’t.

These tiny discoveries make a house feel Christmassy in a way that one perfectly decorated room sometimes doesn’t.

This is probably the biggest difference between a decorated house and a house that feels like Christmas. Use it.

Have coffee beside the tree before work. Put Christmas music on while cooking dinner. Wrap presents on the floor. Read on the sofa with the lights on. Eat something festive on a completely unimportant Wednesday.

You don’t need to wait for the official Christmas activities.

Choose one December evening and deliberately don’t book anything. Put the lights on early. Make something nice to drink. Get the snacks out. Read, watch a Christmas film or do something with your hands.

One of my favourite versions of this is reading while Bas builds Lego nearby, Christmas music playing quietly in the background.

Nothing particularly noteworthy happens. That’s why I like it.

You don’t need to bake an elaborate gingerbread house. A tube of cinnamon-roll dough counts. So does warming croissants. So does opening the box of Christmas chocolates you were supposedly saving.

Food makes a season tangible. The kitchen starts feeling like Christmas when the things you make and reach for begin changing with it.

I love buying things at Christmas that we’ve never tried before. Supermarkets suddenly become full of limited editions, unusual drinks, ridiculous crisps, fancy cheeses and desserts in packaging specifically designed to make me put them in my trolley. I frequently oblige.

Try something new. If it’s wonderful, you’ve discovered a new tradition. If it’s awful, you have something to complain about together. Also festive.

Not everything needs your full attention. Sometimes having a familiar Christmas film, concert or cosy Christmas ambience playing in the background is enough to change the room.

It works particularly well while wrapping presents, cooking or pottering around the house.

Blanket. Cushions. Something to drink. Something to snack on. Christmas lights visible from where you’re sitting.

This is not complicated interior design. It’s simply making the place where you actually spend your evening feel like somewhere you’d quite like to stay.

This is the real trick. Don’t decorate your house beautifully and then spend December waiting for the official celebrations to begin.

Use the nice glasses. Light the expensive candle. Make the festive coffee. Watch the film. Open the chocolates. Play the record.

Christmas is short enough already.

You can buy decorations, but you can’t really buy atmosphere. Atmosphere comes from repetition.

The same record appearing every December. The tree lights coming on at dusk. Coffee beside the tree. Candles burning while dinner cooks. A Christmas film you’ve already seen twenty times. The house starts to feel like Christmas because life inside it has changed slightly.

So before buying another decoration, try changing the evening instead. Turn off the overhead light. Put some music on. Light the candle. Make something good.

And stay awhile.