Decorating Our Front Porch for Christmas: Our Holiday Swag & Planters

I love coming up with new decorating ideas every Christmas (you can tour my Christmas home this year {HERE}) but I have a few traditions that I repeat year after year, including the Christmas swag on our front door. When we first moved in five years ago, I clipped some evergreen branches from the tree in our front yard, berry branches from the back yard, looped on a trio of bells and a bow and the tradition was born! I not only love that I’m able to put it together using branches foraged from our own yard, but also that it’s quick and simple to make (definitely a good thing considering I always seem to pick the coldest weather day to put it together!). I think my Christmas swag and planters this year are my favorites yet – come on over and let me show you! (post includes affiliate links – see my full disclosure statement {here}). 

Scroll & Click/Tap to Shop My Porch:

Every year since I started making a Christmas door swag back in 2013, it’s gotten a little more “large and in charge”. If I live in this house another 5-6 years, my swags might eventually start taking over the entire door 🙂 . It’s actually the natural, untamed look of it that I love the most:

I always use 2.5″ wired edge ribbon but change up the style of ribbon each year – this year I fell in love with {this watercolor ribbon} and I used it on both my door swag and my kitchen wreath. It comes in several different color options but I went with traditional red. You can see more of my favorite Christmas ribbons and my favorite places to shop for ribbon in {this post}.   

While I stuck with an old standby to decorate our front door, I did something different from past years with my planters:

They actually turned out better than I expected considering that I simply bought a few bundles of greenery that I thought looked pretty and totally winged it from there! Here’s exactly what I did:

1. Filled each planter with soil
2. Distributed 5-6 short magnolia branch bundles throughout the planter
3. Filled in the empty spaces with the integrifolia (leafy greenery) – you could also use boxwood branches or other greenery for this
4. Distributed 3 rose hips stems (the berries) throughout each planter
5. Finished each planter off with two pinecones on sticks stuck into the soil. I had these from past Christmas seasons – you can buy them this way or hot glue a wood skewer or dowel onto a pinecone for a quick and easy DIY. 

I’m loving this festive mix!

The great thing about using magnolia branches and integrifolia is that even when they die, they dry looking very much like they do when alive (at least in cold weather climates like ours!) so my planters should stay looking good all winter long. I’m not sure if the rose hips will eventually shrivel up or not – they look great two weeks out but I’ll report back and let you know how they’re looking further into the winter. The only thing missing now is snow – it’s the first year I’ve lived in Connecticut that we haven’t had a good snow by now!

I thought I’d give you a quick tutorial on how to make our Christmas door swag too because I’ve gotten so many questions about it. The star of the show is this trio of Christmas bells that I bought {here}. The online photo of the bell set is kind of underwhelming so when I received them, I was surprised at how gorgeous they are. Can you see all of the pretty detailing?:

Love them! Here’s how I put the rest of it together:

1. Gather Greenery & Berry Branches

I’m lucky to have the mother of all Christmas trees smack in the middle of our front yard: 

2. Layer Your Greenery and Berry Branches

The rest is simple!  Layer your greenery and berry branches (I put the berry branches near the front with one thin layer of greenery over at least some of them) and cut the ends of the branches so that they’re even:

Tie your branches together with either rubber bands or a hairband (hairbands tend to hold up better over time!)

3. Hang Your Swag from a Wreath Hanger

Pick your swag up from the banded end with about half of the branches on one side and half on the other side and hang it from your front door on a simple wreath hanger such as {this one}:

4. Layer on the Bells

The bells come hung on a rope loop so it’s pretty simple to layer them on – just loop them over the top of the greenery branch ends:

5. Tie a Bow on It!

Using 2-3″ wired edge ribbon, tie a bow around the top where it hides the band holding it together. You need a longer length of ribbon than you would expect (at least three yards!) so that you have long ribbon tails that cascade down the sides of the swag:

Then just take a step back, trim your swag up a little if it needs it, and that’s it, you’re done! The whole thing takes less than half an hour to make – I’ve actually found that I like how it turns out best if I don’t fuss too much over it since the beauty of it is how natural it looks. 

Have you guys finished all of your Christmas decorating? I finally wrapped mine up this week and have a few more things to share with you including some simple ideas for decorating your holiday table – I’ll see you back here in a few days with that! If you’re like me and wrapping up your Christmas shopping in your PJs today, I just added tons of new things to my Shop page that are great for gift giving – you can hop over to my Shop page {HERE} to see them all – these are just a few of my finds:

I hope you’re able to get all of that last minute shopping done and start enjoying the beauty of the season if you haven’t already!