Lifestyle & Seasonal

Fall mantle decor – celebrate the harvest

The winter holidays may be fast approaching, but we can give thanks for the harvest season with these fall decor ideas.

Between the frightening fun of Halloween and the cozy, candied Christmas seasons, it’s easy to lose the best season of the year: Autumn. Thanksgiving is the culmination of the fall season where we celebrate all those small strokes of luck and big blessings that we’ve been fortunate to receive. All too often this decor gets lost between October holidays and the New Year’s Eve parties. Let’s bring back a bit of fall to the fireplace area and tabletops.

Turn into fall

Transition is a main theme of the fall season. In the agricultural days, the fall season was for reaping the crops and storing food. The work changes and there is more time to spend with family and friends. “Transitional style” in interior design refers to blending contemporary furniture and fabrics with traditional shapes and lines. Tans and shades of white dominate this kind of modern-farmhouse look. Fall mantle decor can take a hint from Transitional style by combining modern materials like craft-foam-and-moss topiaries with containers made of classic metals or ceramics. Keep the colors in the autumn color ranges, with golden yellows, oranges, deep reds, greens and browns. Because a Transitional style lacks a lot of color, a little bright fall leaf hues will go a long way. Varying textures are a way to introduce interest to a limited color palette.

Simple abundance

You don’t need to go big to celebrate the abundance of the harvest. A few candles and a leaf garland on the mantle will signal the season’s care message of simple living and grateful gathering. Alternatively, a mantle stuffed full of fall swag can be gorgeous. Cornucopias full of faux fruit, pine cone crafts and pumpkins (not just for Halloween!) make for a mantle of plenty. If fruit and veggies, faux-or-real, aren’t your thing, you can fill vases with raw wheat stalks or goldenrod and scatter fall leaves around their bases. Leaves and acorns make great fillers and they are easily collected by kids and adults.

Personal treasures

If you are hosting gatherings over the course of the fall season, consider making a mantle of memories. Search through your storage for personal pictures, rusty flea-market finds, and grandma’s lace to create an especially welcoming scene for family and friends. Call up cousins to ask to use an ancestral photo for a few weeks. Print grandma’s recipes on beautiful cards and place them in small frames along the mantle. Creatively displaying the best parts of your pasts will help you and your guests look optimistically into the future.

Grab the golden days

Make sure to recognize the fall season. Let’s not be rushed into welcoming Old Man Winter before he’s due. The colors, aromas and crunchy leaf sounds of the autumn season are to be enjoyed and celebrated. Start building up your autumn decor collection, and you’ll never feel like the fall fun is over before it began.

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