CHRISTMAS White and Gold Farmhouse Bedroom Decorated For Christmas

Yesterday I shared Westleigh’s room decorated for Christmas.

And today?

I’m sharing the room right across the hall…

…her sister Whitney’s room.

Whitney and Westleigh.

The twins who have grown up here at Thistlewood.

Just between us?

Have you ever wondered where the name Thistlewood Farm comes from?

I know you will be totally surprised at this….

… but there’s a story. 

Are you rolling your eyes at me right now and nodding?

You knew it—right?

Because around here it always begins and ends with once upon a time.

It’s a once upon a time that started with a thorn.

And not just one thorn…

…but hundreds and hundreds of them.

If you’ve read this blog for a hot minute, you already know our story. The story about how we moved from the city to the country and found a farmhouse in the middle of rural Kentucky where we lived with four children, two dogs, two cats, a family of deer, half a dozen bunny rabbits, salamanders, and a giant tortoise named Fred.

Trust me.

It was a menagerie of great proportions.

We remodeled that farmhouse from the ceilings to the floors.

We knocked down walls and pulled up carpeting and removed wallpaper from twelve rooms in the house and added molding and painted and removed layers and layers of flooring and added a porch.

And that was only the inside.

When we finished the farmhouse remodel, we patted ourselves on the back and thought we were done…..

… until we walked outside.

*sigh*

We had been so busy renovating the inside that we had forgotten all about what was going on right outside our front door. During all those long winter months the outside of the house had looked fine when the yard was covered with snow.

And then the snow melted.

And we discovered that the yard needed help.

Lots of help.

The garden beds were overgrown and the bushes needed to be trimmed and the flowers needed to be divided and everywhere you looked there were thorns and thistles.

(please tell me you can tell where this is going)

My husband started working on the landscaping. He tried to get rid of the thistles that covered everything and the thorny branches that wound their way around plants and trees. He dug up the thistles at the roots and cut them back, but they were tenacious and fierce and unrelenting and as hard as he fought it looked like the thorns were going to win.

But in the end, he triumphed.

(total aside: if he was telling you this story—he would say there was never any doubt)

And after the thorns left, he discovered something amazing. There in the yard, hidden behind where all the brambles had been—were the most beautiful purple phlox. They had been there all along, but we missed them because of the thorns and the overgrown landscaping. The phlox grew taller and bigger each year and spread out until it covered the entire path that led down to the pond.

And we would have never discovered them without the thistles.

(total aside: we tried to bring some of that phlox with us when we moved to Texas, but in sad news, it didn’t transplant well).

It’s a little like life.

Thorns can be overwhelming and tenacious, but they make the flowers all the sweeter.

And so to honor the briars and brambles and thistles along our journey….

….Thistlewood Farms was born.

We left the farmhouse over seven years ago, but the story of Thistlewood Farms continues.

We’ve moved back to the house where I grew up and now I get to decorate my childhood home for Christmas.

It makes my heart the happiest.

Especially the joy of decorating Whitney’s room with white trees and tiny villages and fur tree skirts and jingle bells.

And on her dresser is one of my favorite Christmas decorations ever—this hand-embroidered nativity set my grandmother gave me when the twins were little.

Every year I open it up and remove it from tissue paper and line up the wisemen and the shepherd and the sheep and Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus and think about my grandmother and how special she was to me.

All the stories.

All the chapters.

All the little snippets of life.

And I’m so happy I have a place to share them.

Right here at Thistlewood.

PS I read my husband this post before I published it and he found a picture of the phlox on his phone.

I think he misses them.

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<!– Removed after blog post link 5-28-2019



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