Category Archives: Christmas
Christmas Home Tour | Jen’s House
Oh, I am so excited about today because I get to show you Jen’s gorgeous home. It’s our last post of this year and it’s a good one. Jen’s home was actually just featured on the front cover of the November/December 2012 Southern Lady Magazine (yeah, Jen!) She has a great southern style, so I know you will just love it.
The monogram in the frame below was made by Jen using an old window. She is so creative, so many of the items you see in the photographs, she actually made.
{Breakfast Area}
I love how she spreads the Christmas decor throughout her home.
Her hallway is perhaps my favorite place in her house!
This bathroom is also my favorite!
I just love her style, so beautiful! I hope you enjoyed the tour!
Our Christmas | Holly’s Home Tour
I hope you had a Merry Christmas and are continuing to have a wonderful holiday season with your family! I am enjoying some down time with my family and it has been so good for me. I hope you’ve had a little time to sit back and take a deep breath as you prepare for the new year. Even though we are “closed” through the 2nd, I wanted to share some pictures from our homes decorated for Christmas. Today, I’m sharing photos of my home and on Monday, I’ll share pictures from Jen’s gorgeous home.
This is our first (and probably only) Christmas in this house. We are currently renting it while we work on plans and start building a house. It was fun this year to have a new blank space to decorate.
I went with an aqua/burlap theme this year. I try to use things around my home or office/craft room to make up new decorations each year.
This year, I used a lot of natural decor in our home. The garland on the stairs was made from extra tree branches that I gathered when we bought our tree. I love the way fresh garland looks on a staircase.
I used cotton and a grapevine wreath to make the wreath over our fireplace.
This is my favorite project! I love how it turned out!
I borrowed this idea of the book Christmas Tree from Jen. I found these old books from my husband’s Great Grannie’s house and they worked perfectly to stack to make a tree (with a cookie cutter star on top, of course!)
I love this vase on the dining table. It’s not necessarily Christmas, so I may leave it like this for a little while because I love how vibrant and pretty it looks. I have a thing for white with pops of color.
Thanks for joining me on a small tour of my home for Christmas! I can’t wait to show you photos of Jen’s home on Monday. Have a great weekend!
A Week in Instagram Photos
Wow, it’s been a busy week around here. I’m starting to feel the holiday stress already. I feel like I’m going to end the week ok, though, I’ve been able to accomplish a lot on my “To Do List”. We’ve started uploading some Christmas designs to the website and have a ton more to add. They should all be up within the next couple weeks. In addition to the new holiday products, I’ve been working on getting everything together for our Christmas Show. I wanted to share with you a little of our week in Instagram pictures.
{Halloween Chevron Stickers}
{Styled shoot for upcoming magazine article}
{Custom Pumpkins & Pirates Party Goods}
{A little fun craft project}
{Local Farmers Market}
See all these and more if you follow us on Instagram: shophollydays
Have a great day!
Breakfast with Santa
One of my friends hosted a super cute (& fun) breakfast with Santa at her home over the weekend. She had Santa come read a story to the kiddos and then they were all able to sit in his lap and get their picture made. She used some of our cupcake sets and bunting to decorate and had Pinterest inspired goodies. I thought it turned out super cute!
Sausage Muffins in our Cupcake Sets (what a creative use for them!)
We had so much fun! It was a perfect special day except when Santa needed to leave his car didn’t want to crank… where are those reindeer when you need them!?
Here’s our family photo with Santa…
Have a great day!
Do What You Love
Some exciting projects are going on around here! I’ve been working on getting the Halloween goodies saved and on the website. My plan is to have them all up on or before Friday. Christmas products will be going up September 1st… only one week, yikes! I’ve got some serious work to do before then! Also, Jenn and I will start working on the displays and plans starting the second week of September for our Christmas Show in Birmingham, Alabama (first week of November- you’ll be hearing much more about it). We’ve also been working on re-branding HollyDays. We think you will really like it!
Also, we are going to discontinue some products. It is hard to give these up, but we believe it is in our best interest in order to focus more on PARTIES! Our personalized clothing and bags will no longer be sold after this weekend. I figured it would be nice to give you a little notice just in case you were holding out for something 
We will sell our Christmas shirts and bottoms online and at our Christmas show as well as the remaining in-stock non-personalized tops and bottoms, but we will not be personalizing any shirts/bags after this weekend. We hope you will understand, this has been a tough decision for me because I LOVE to see the designs I’ve created to be placed on other merchandise, but for now, we want to really put our focus on parties and events… and that is what makes me excited.
Thanks to these fabulous women, I have been giving much more heartfelt thought to the future of HollyDays and doing what I love. Yes, it is a little scary, especially when I am thinking about discontinuing products I think are cute and very “sellable”, but not what I live for doing.
{Image by Meg Baisden Photography, http://www.MegPhoto.com}
While at The Stationery Academy, I was asked by Whitney “What is your definition of success?” You know, everyone’s definition is different and that is what makes success so great. Maybe it is owning a large stationery company like Whitney or maybe it is being able to stay at home with your children. When I started HollyDays in 2006, my goal was to be able to make a little extra money and have something to do in addition to being a stay-at-home-mommy. You know, my vision really hasn’t changed in five years. I had started thinking in a take-over-the-world mentality that I wanted to grow HollyDays into a huge operation with a lot of employees and you know where that would leave me- not fulfilling my vision, my purpose. I guess I was getting caught up in someone else’s definition of success. My vision truly is this- to be a business operated with the goal to help moms (myself included and my employees). Jenn is a mom, I’m a mom and we love what we do- being creative and helping others plan and pull off a beautiful/cute/fun/creative event.
And so unless Oprah discovers our fabulousness (ha!), we’ll be a mommy business, happily serving our wonderful customers. If you are a mom or soon-to-be-mom, sister, brother, dad, grandmother… one at a time we want to help make your parties and events special and a memory worth making extra special.
Here are a few more shots from the academy: This must have been one of my “lightbulb” moments.
{Image by Meg Baisden Photography, http://www.MegPhoto.com}
And my new amazingly creative and amazingly encouraging friends…
{Image by Meg Baisden Photography, http://www.MegPhoto.com}
What is your definition of success? Start working towards it! Make it happen! A year from now, you will wish you had started today. - Karen Lamb.
My Favorites of 2010
A new year always makes me start reflecting on the past year. For the next several days, I’ll be sharing some of my favorites of 2010… let’s start today with some of my favorite Christmas cards from 2010. November and December go by in a blink for me, so it is fun to take a look back at what all we were able to accomplish.
This is one of my favorite Christmas cards. Leslie sent me all these super cute photos and we wanted to fit them all on the card, so we did! A big family picture was printed on the back so that after Christmas, their family/friends could frame the 5×7 photo! Is this baby girl just the cutest thing ever?! and Max is a handsome little dude…
This one got my husband’s vote for his favorite card. It was so fun and a whimsical way to show off some cute photos.
This is another of my favorites!
This card proved to be one of our most popular sellers this year. It was a photo insert card – the customer can attach a 4×6″ photo or we print the photo on the cards.
Our cards either have a coordinating pattern/image printed on the back or either a photo. I just have to show the back of the previous card off because it is such a cute photo!
And of course, my family’s card for the year. We decided to do a New Years card instead of a Christmas card because we took a trip to Disney World with my husband’s family mid-December and wanted to show off some of those photos. You may have seen the front of the card earlier this week. It was a folded card. My favorite is the inside…
Here’s the inside:
Ok, I’m done! That was so fun! We had a great Christmas season. Thank you to all our customers for supporting us this year!
Christmas Sale!
Today begins our EARLY BIRD CHRISTMAS SALE! Wahooo! Shop now for the BEST prices of the season! ALL Christmas Goodies are 20% off through Friday, October 22. Use code EARLY10 at checkout. Now, we have had some issues with the code working properly. If you have issues, we’ll adjust your total before we run your credit card. Also, if you want to order photo cards, but don’t have your pictures ready, no problem! We’ll hold your order until your photos are ready. So order TODAY!
Working on Christmas
We’ve been working on getting our Christmas items up on our website. It’s been a busy week trying to get everything up in addition to our regular orders. My goal is to have everything or almost everything up by October 1, which is Friday. Two more days! Keep an eye out… we’ll be having an early bird sale very soon! Oh, and we’ll be getting up the Halloween and Thanksgiving stuff, too. We do things backwards sometimes!
Yesterday, I had a photo shoot of all our Christmas clothing. They are almost up and ready, but we have a few more to add.
We have a Manger scene design that I am so excited about. It will be available on girls and boys clothing. It has this Bible scripture around it:
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given … and His name shall be called
Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Isaiah 9:6
Hope you have a great day and we’ll let you know when everything is up!
