Tiny Home for the Holidays

We love Christmas around here. (We start celebrating right after the trick or treating is done, after all!)

Celebrating in a Tiny House isn't really that different from any other house. We put up a tree and decorate and wrap gifts and bake cookies and watch Christmas movies and listen to Christmas music.

There are some slight differences, though.

The Christmas Tree

According to the National Christmas Tree Association, the average Christmas tree is six to seven feet tall. While we have the ceiling height for a tree that size in our home, we don't have the floor space for one. We have the perfect little ledge in our loft for a four-foot tree, and that size is perfect for our space without overpowering the room. (We've had the tree downstairs before, too.)

Because our tree is small, we don't keep very many Christmas ornaments around, which helps with storage space as well. This means decorating (and undecorating) our Christmas tree is a piece of cake and doesn't take long at all. It also means that the sock monkey ornament is half as tall as the tree, but no one has made any King Kong jokes yet, so I think we're good.

The Decorations

Speaking of decorations, we don't have many because there just isn't room to store them when we're not using them. We have to choose which decorations are worth keeping year round, and for us, it's been pretty simple. We have our artificial tree, an artificial poinsettia garland that we hang from our loft railing, personalized stockings that we also hang from our loft railing, and one Christmas hand towel. We also have outdoor Christmas lights. That's pretty much it. In a larger house, that would seem pretty bare, but in our tiny house, it's plenty to give us some holiday ambiance.

It's also easy to store the outdoor lights and the poinsettia garland since we rarely get around to putting them away. Poinsettias are still pretty in the summer. Add some blue and white, and we're ready for the Fourth of July.

The Gifts

Living in a tiny house does limit us a bit when it comes to gifts, and I don't just mean finding room for the gifts we're given. We have to store the gifts somewhere while they're waiting to be wrapped. (Right now they're taped inside a big cardboard box. And hiding up in the loft. And stuffed into random nooks and crannies. This is a good way to lose a gift before you can wrap it. It's always fun to find random gift cards in the summer. Who doesn't love Christmas in July? See, the lingering poinsettia garland makes sense now.)

Then there's the wrapping of the gifts. Have you ever tried to wrap a large present in a small house? It's not always easy. We have a large board that is actually supposed to be a cupboard door that we pull out for activities that require a sturdy, flat surface, and that makes a good present wrapping place. But there have been many Christmases when I was sitting on the floor in the kitchen trying to turn things and push stuff out of the way so there was enough room to wrap everything. I'm not even going to get into finding room to store the wrapping paper and gift bags...

Then there's the issue of fitting the wrapped presents under our tiny Christmas tree. Yeah, they don't fit. No big deal, we'll just pile them up next to the tree and wherever we can find space. (Again, this is a good way to lose presents. Just saying.)

When Christmas is all over, we have to find homes for all of the gifts with which our loved ones have blessed us. I'm not going to lie: there have been years when the box of Christmas presents still has a few odds and ends in it come February. Or May. Or July. Christmas in July, folks. It's a thing.

The Christmas Goodies

When it comes to baking, Chris is the master around here. (Except for pies. I bake the pies once a year. And then I remember why I don't bake pies. Chris doesn't like pie anyway.) We actually manage cooking and baking pretty well in our tiny kitchen. The key is to keep your work surface as clear as possible at all times. If you can master that, you'll probably be fine in a small kitchen. We've baked pies and bread and muffins and dozens and dozens of cookies in our tiny house over the years, and while it can be crazy and cluttered and chaotic to do so, it's still fun and worth the mess in the end. And it's okay that the plate of cookies takes up half of our counter space when we're done because that just means we have to eat them faster. I have yet to hear any complaints about that. (I couldn't find a photo of the beautiful red velvet cookies Chris makes at Christmas, so these eye ball monster cookies will have to do. You're welcome.)

Christmas Movies

We have a small collection of Christmas classics that we keep with the rest of the DVDs and Blu-rays on the shelving above our living room windows, and we have an ever-growing digital library as well. The nice thing about living in a tiny space is that a 43 inch TV looks huge and a small sound system sounds great, so you can get a great movie watching experience at a much lower investment. Not that we need to watch It's a Wonderful Life and White Christmas in high definition or anything. Sometimes the TV actually seems too big, like the prime seating for it is outside our windows looking in, but it rains a lot here, so that would be awkward.

Christmas Music

We have two Amazon echo dot devices in our tiny house, and that's actually too many sometimes. They can both hear you at the same time if you talk loudly enough. Sometimes they talk to you even when you don't talk to them, but that's an issue for another conversation. (What is up with that? No, Alexa, I wasn't talking to you. No, Alexa, I don't want to play that game. No, Alexa, I don't want to hear about how I can buy a subscription to whatever that was, and neither does my five-year-old. Especially not my five-year-old.)

We do listen to a lot of our holiday music through Alexa, although I was a little shocked when I asked her to play me some Straight No Chaser Christmas music last year, and she told me this group didn't have any Christmas music. Alexa gets confused easily it seems.

We also went through and organized our digital music collection this year so that we can access most of it from our PC, which is hooked up to our TV, and since our TV is pretty smart, it doesn't have any trouble playing Straight No Chaser Christmas music. (You could learn something here, Alexa.)

We're All Really Just Doing the Best We Can

As you can see, holidays in a tiny house are really not that different from holidays in a bigger home. It may be a little easier in some ways and harder in others, but in the end, we're really all just doing the best we can to not go crazy and to slow down and actually enjoy the Christmas season.

And Christmas in July, because that's fun, too.

This post was written for inclusion in the December 2018 collection of the Small Family Homes Blog Community. Read below for more writings on living small from our community of writers. Check back next month for a new topic and posts in the series. And if there is a topic you'd like to see us write about, let us know! 

Fourth & West-- "The Real Wealth of Christmas" : The greatest lesson in the book of hygge.

Tiny Ass Camper-- "The Ghost of Christmas Past" : The way we celebrate the holidays has little to do with what we choose to live in and everything to do with how that choice has changed us.